London

by Edward Rutherfurd

  Mrs Silversleeves didn’t go out much nowadays, but when she did there were two places she liked to visit. One was Highgate Cemetery where, as he had wished, Arnold Silversleeves had been buried under a cast iron tombstone of his own design. The other was Tower Bridge; for that massive iron machine, whose bascules he had helped design, had been a source of such pride to Arnold Silversleeves in his final years that when Esther took her carriage down to the bank of the Thames she would gaze at it and declare: “Now that is my husband’s true memorial.”

  The previous week however, she had not felt up to going out and had said to Jenny: “You go down there for me. You can take the carriage, have a walk and tell me how it looks.” And this was what Jenny had been doing when she met the Fleming brothers.

  Dear old Mrs Silversleeves. How vividly Jenny remembered her first arrival in the big, gabled house. She had been so nervous, with her new name of Ducket and all her grandmother Lucy’s warnings and instructions ringing in her ears. “But they will give you a home, Jenny,” her grandmother had told her, and in their way they had.

  Life as a servant was hard work. Often Jenny would leave her tiny room up in the attic at five in the morning. As the youngest she had had the worst jobs, carrying the coal scuttles upstairs, cleaning out the grates, polishing the brass and scrubbing floors. At nights she would sink into bed exhausted. But compared to the life she had known in the East End, it was heaven. Clean clothes, clean sheets, enough to eat. She was expected to go to church every Sunday with the family, but she didn’t mind that. And if at first she had found it difficult to remember to bob a little curtsey to Mr Silversleeves or to be properly respectful to the housekeeper, she knew it was only the proper order of things. “For we none of us, Jenny,” Mrs Silversleeves would gently tell her, “need to get above our station.”

  Gradually, little changes had taken place. There was always a present at Christmas. Old Mr Silversleeves had shown her how to look after her tiny savings and augmented them from time to time with a guinea. As for Mrs Silversleeves, as Jenny progressed over the years to housemaid and finally to her lady’s maid, she realized that the old lady was very fond of her. She would often say, “Here’s a silk scarf you might like for your days off, Jenny.” Or a pair of gloves. Or even a coat. Often they were hardly worn and once or twice she suspected that items of clothing had been bought with her in mind all along. Quite often, since being widowed, Mrs Silversleeves would have her remain in the sitting room with her, ask her to read the small print in the newspaper to her and talk to her. Only one subject seemed to be forbidden. When Jenny went, twice a year, to see her father and her brother in the East End, she never mentioned it to her employer. If she did, the old lady became distant and remarked: “We don’t want to hear about that, Jenny.”

  There had been no men in her life. When she was a girl, some of the delivery boys had tried to flirt with her, but she had soon sent them packing. Over the years, through the other women working in the house, she had made a few friends and had met men occasionally, going out with them. There had been a young coachman, a greengrocer and a tramdriver who had all shown an interest in her. “I don’t know why, I’m sure,” she had confided to the cook, “because I’m nothing much to look at, all pale and thin.” But as soon as these advances began, she had quietly discouraged them. She had her reasons. And in recent years, she sensed that old Mrs Silversleeves had so grown to rely on her that she would have felt guilty about leaving her anyway.

  So why was she going to Tower Bridge? There was something about Percy, with his concave face, a little sad perhaps but determined, which made him look reliable. And when his brother had said that he needed a wife, she had suddenly felt that yes, she could do that. On Friday she had decided she’d just go for a walk on Hampstead Heath on her day off. She only gave her overcoat a good brush because it was time it had one anyway. And if now, on Saturday, she was making her way to Tower Bridge after all, she told herself it didn’t signify. “Because he won’t be there anyway.”

  She was really quite surprised to see him then, an hour later, standing in the middle of the bridge, trying to look casual and pretending he wasn’t half frozen after waiting.

  “Hello,” Jenny said. “Fancy seeing you here!”

  There were several regular places where Violet took her children, because it was good for them. Some they liked better than others. The Botanical Gardens at Kew was popular in summer, because they took a boat upriver to get there. Madame Tussaud’s waxworks was a favourite too. The pictures in the National Gallery were a duty, though they enjoyed feeding the pigeons that swarmed in Trafalgar Square outside. More often requested was a visit to South Kensington.

  So great had the profits of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851 been that the government had been able to use them to purchase a whole area running down from Hyde Park to South Kensington and here, on each side of a broad avenue called Exhibition Road, several magnificent museums were clustered. As well as the Albert Hall by the park, the new Victoria and Albert Museum was almost completed, and opposite, in a vast, cathedral-like structure, was the Natural History Museum, where fossils, rocks and wonderful drawings of plants all gave evidence of the scientific discoveries and the Darwinian ideas which had been changing the intellectual world in the last two generations. The children loved in particular the huge reconstruction of skeletons of the long-extinct dinosaurs.

  For Violet herself there was one excursion that far surpassed all the rest, perhaps because the huge site it occupied lay in the heart of Bloomsbury, the quiet brown-brick Georgian area just east of Tottenham Court Road. It was here that many of the buildings of the University of London, which she would have liked to attend, were to be found. Its collection of antiquities was unrivalled anywhere in the world, and at least once every holidays her three children were taken to the magnificent splendours of the British Museum.

  This grey December day, as they were looking at the Egyptian mummies and their cases – always a favourite section with the children – Henry asked casually: “Mother, you aren’t going to go on being a Suffragette, are you?”

  Violet stared at him blankly. Like many Edwardian parents, she assumed that children remained in a childlike, unquestioning state until they suddenly became adults. She had never discussed her activities even with Henry, except to tell him that women were suffering a great injustice and that she and other brave women were trying to correct it.

  Two of her three children believed her implicitly. Little Helen, naturally, wanted to copy her mother in every way, but she had noticed once or twice during the autumn, when her nanny took her to school, that the other nannies had given them strange looks. As for Frederick, too young for Charterhouse, but already boarding away at a preparatory school, the news of his mother’s escapade had hardly reached him. To the eight-year-old boy she was the angel, the kindly vision he dreamed of when he was lonely. But, just as naturally, he hero-worshipped his older brother Henry. If Henry and his mother were in dispute therefore, he closed his mind to the whole subject.

  “It depends on what the government does,” Violet answered.

  “Well, I wish you’d drop it,” said Henry.

  Violet paused. It was so difficult, without her husband, to know how to react to what, she couldn’t help thinking, was a great impertinence. “Your father was very much in favour of votes for women,” she said carefully.

  “I dare say!” Henry replied. “But would he have let you run about in the street and harass the Prime Minister?”

  This was going too far, especially in front of the other children. “You are not to speak to me like that, Henry!”

  “You should hear how they speak to me about you at school,” he said gloomily.

  “Then the worse for them,” she said stoutly. “I hope you know that the cause is right.”

  “No one else seems to think so,” he remarked bitterly. “Couldn’t you just help them without getting in the newspapers?”

  “I am very sorry tha
t you cannot see it is my moral duty to go on,” she replied with dignity. “Perhaps in time you will.”

  “I shall never, mother,” he said with equal gravity. It seemed to Violet, as he turned his face away, that some bond between them had suddenly and unexpectedly snapped for ever. Oh, she thought to herself with anguish, if only his father were here to share this burden with me now.

  1910

  Few of those who buy a West End suit realize that the top half and the bottom have almost certainly been made by different people. When customers came to Tom Brown, their jacket was made by a coat-maker, their vest (English customers called it a waistcoat, though tailors and customers from America still retained the older term of vest) was made by a waistcoat-maker, and their trousers (Americans still said pants, from the pantaloon breeches of the previous era) by a trouser-maker.

  Percy Fleming was a trouser-maker and by now he had become very skilled indeed. “I don’t know how you do it,” Mr Brown had remarked to him recently, “but in the last year we haven’t needed to alter a single pair of your trousers, even at the last fitting.” Several other fine establishments could have said the same, and as a result, Percy was making a very good living indeed. Which was a good thing really, because he was planning to get married.

  He and Jenny had taken their time. They were both cautious, and as they were able to meet at most once a week, he had never been sure during the first months whether he had even established a friendship. But he had persevered, and by the autumn of the previous year she seemed to have relaxed enough even to suggest a rendezvous herself. “I’ve never been to the zoo,” she had said. “Would you like to go there next week?” Yet it had not prevented her, the following month, claiming that she was too busy to see him for three weeks.

  “She’s playing hard to get,” Herbert told him when Percy consulted him. But Percy was not so sure. It had seemed to him that behind her studiously casual friendship, there lay a fear.

  Percy’s lodgings were on the top floor of a house on the slopes near Crystal Palace, overlooking Gipsy Hill railway station and the parkland around the suburban village of Dulwich beyond. The bedroom was tiny, but there was a large, light attic and this he had arranged as his workroom. As he cut, and stitched, and pressed, he could look up, glance out of the window and see right across London, to the hills of Highgate and Hampstead on the other side. It was a long way, there was no doubt about it. Worlds apart, most people would say. With the material progress of the Victorian age, London had strangely become more divided. The separation of the rich West End from the poorer East went back to the days of the Stuarts, but it was only in recent decades that another division had taken place: the split between north and south of the river.

  It was the bridges and the railways that had done it. Always before, the river had been London’s thoroughfare. There might have been only one bridge, but there were watermen, literally thousands, to ferry folk across to the theatres, pleasure gardens and other entertainments along the southern bank. As the bridges of the nineteenth century appeared, however, the watermen disappeared and the river slowly lost its colourful life. Then the railways had come, carrying the ever swelling population further and further out to suburbs north and south until now they were even spilling over the distant rims of Highgate in the north and Crystal Palace in the south. The stations – Waterloo, Victoria, Cannon Street, London Bridge – that lay along the river’s banks had covered the old areas like Bankside and Vauxhall with railway lines. And so, as the vast, sprawling metropolis spread even further outwards, the two worlds had slowly separated. Middle-class and clerical folk came in from southern suburbs to work in the City or the West End, but were swiftly carried back to their homes, miles away in suburbs. Labouring men, though there were cheap fares to help them travel, usually lived close by their work, in one or other of the two worlds. And the River Thames was the great divider.

  When the afternoon light faded and the distant hills of Hampstead turned a purplish brown, Percy would be overcome by a sense of sadness. He would wish that he could go to Jenny, there and then, see her pale face, feel her eyes on him, just be in her presence. Yet still a week, perhaps two or three would go by before she would see him.

  They always met somewhere in central London. Once, when he had suggested they could go for a walk on Hampstead Heath, she shook her head firmly and told him: “No. That’s ever such a long way to come, just for a walk.” And he had understood: it was too much of an invasion of her territory, implied too much commitment. They had always met in the safe and neutral zone after that.

  It was hard to say exactly when he had detected a change. Perhaps it was the moment in Hyde Park when, for the first time, she had linked her arm in his. Their meetings had always been by day: a walk, a visit to the Tower, a visit to a tea shop, but as summer began he had determined to attempt something more daring: he would take her out one evening. He hardly knew what to do until Herbert had come to his aid.

  “The Palladium, Percy,” he declared. “It’s all the rage.”

  What a night that had been! The huge new theatre, which had only just opened in Piccadilly Circus, was offering the biggest and most splendid music-hall entertainment in London. He had never seen Jenny so animated. She had even joined in when the audience sang along with some of the musical numbers. Flushed and happy, she had let him escort her back to Hampstead in a cab afterwards.

  At the gates of the tall gabled house, she had let him kiss her on the cheek. Then he had walked all the way back through the warm night to Victoria Station where, having missed the last train, he lay contentedly on a bench and took the first train at dawn.

  All this week the weather had been wonderfully fine. Each morning he had been up at dawn, and as he looked across London, where a hundred thousand roofs glistened with the dew, the faraway ridges of Hampstead were now so green and sparklingly clear that it seemed as if he could reach out and touch them. With the aid of a map, he had worked out exactly at what point on the skyline the Silversleeves house must be. He would imagine Jenny, getting up, going about her business; and from time to time as he stared across the place he would murmur: “I’m waiting for you, girl.”

  One other milestone of huge significance had been passed that wonderful evening. Before he left her at Hampstead, Percy had extracted a promise that, the following Sunday, she would come to Crystal Palace.

  ‘We’ll go and have Sunday lunch with Herbert and Maisie,” he’d said. “I can meet you at the station.”

  Jenny had only paused a moment before she said: “All right, then.”

  He was sure it would all go off well.

  East End. No end. Grey streets, grimy streets, streets without number, streets without meaning, streets that spread on and on under the dull, dreary eastern sky until, somewhere out past the miles and miles of docks they dissolved like an estuary, into a sea of nothingness. East End. Dead end. The East End was not a place, it was a state of mind.

  The street where Jenny’s family now lived was a short, dingy terrace that had apparently been cut off just as it meant to get started by a high warehouse wall. Their three rooms, on the ground floor of one of the mean little houses, had to contain her brother and his wife, three children, and her father who, though only fifty-six, had discovered that he could no longer work.

  It was always the same. Jenny would visit, give him a few shillings, and her brother rather more. And her father would say, with the heavy sentimentality of a drunk: “You see, she never forgets her family.” Her brother would say nothing, but his thought was as clear as if he had spoken it aloud. “It’s all right for some.”

  Her brother worked in the docks: some days he found work and some days he did not. But he was better off than some, for the friendships he had formed with the wilder Jewish boys of which old Lucy had so disapproved had turned out to be fortunate.

  The trade in second-hand clothes was a lively business. If the better-off classes had their clothes made for them, most poor people in London dress
ed in second-hand garments and there were plenty of East Enders, usually Jewish, in this trade. And since one of his betting friends had settled into this trade, Jenny’s brother was often able to get some extra work driving the cart or minding the store. The sturdy old coat her father wore had once belonged to a sea captain; her brother’s three children at least had boots of approximately the right size. And if her brother may have supplemented his income in other less legitimate ways from time to time, while his wife did what jobs she could, Jenny knew very well that they did what they thought they had to.

  When her brother’s wife, in her solid blouse and frayed skirt, came up to her and saw the clothes Mrs Silversleeves had given her, so neatly laundered and starched, when she could smell how clean Jenny was – “She smells of lavender water,” she sadly remarked – and looked at her own roughened hands and chipped nails, when she tried to imagine what kind of house Jenny must live in and glanced at her own tiny rooms with their threadbare pieces of carpet, it was impossible for her not to feel envy. And it was impossible for her brother to keep a trace of malice out of his voice when he greeted her:

  “Here’s my sister Jenny, then. Ever so respectable.”

  Jenny did not blame them, but she felt awkward. She knew she could not quite disguise her own repugnance. The musty smell of long-boiled cabbage that pervaded the place; the stinking privy outside that three families shared; the general meanness of everything and, worst of all, the acceptance of these things. It was not that she had forgotten what it was to live like this. She could remember her poor grandmother Lucy with the miserable piles of matchboxes; she could remember hunger, a life far worse than this. But above all, she remembered the last words, spoken with a terrible urgency, that old Lucy had ever said to her. “Don’t come back, Jenny. Don’t you ever, ever go back to where you’ve been.”