At first I thought I was dreaming. My tongue was so dry it had fossilised in my mouth. I called out for water. From beneath my cot I heard a rustling – the truckle bed had been taken since I had fallen asleep – and a face appeared at my side, a face that was inconceivably familiar. The boy was pale, malnourished, perhaps ten or eleven years old. He had lit a stub of candle, and I reached out a hand to touch him. It was no dream.
His face seemed to be in shadow; then I saw that it was disfigured by a livid port wine stain running from cheek to neck. Having stared fixedly at me, he walked off, returning shortly with a jug of water. He held it for me as I raised myself to drink, sluicing the dried scabbard of my mouth.
‘Do I know you?’ I said to him.
The boy nodded. ‘You gave me dad a sov once. Outside the big house.’ The Irish accent did it. It was the son of the cigar-end collector, whose unwitting trespass into Elder’s garden I had recalled only an hour before.
‘Where’s your dad now?’
‘Out worken,’ he shrugged, as though to say, What else would he be doing in the middle of the night? ‘Your face is drippen wet,’ he added.
I looked across the room at the untidy heaps of the other sleepers. I called out, but neither of them stirred. Where was I to get help? ‘Do you know of a doctor near here?’
The boy shook his head, and said, quite casually, ‘Are you gonna die?’
I pulled back the blanket to examine the wound; the sheet was dark with blood. ‘I believe I am,’ I said, and he nodded sadly. I sank back onto the pillow. Minutes passed, and I thought how very unexciting was the struggle against death. Unexciting, but also undemanding. Why worry? I dozed off again, maybe for only a minute, when the boy shook me awake.
‘You want a priest?’ His voice had a slight tremble in it – I don’t suppose he wanted to watch me expire – and, fighting my tiredness, I propped myself up by the elbows.
‘Listen, you remember the sov. Would you do me a favour in return?’ He nodded, and I asked him if he knew Clarendon Square in Somers Town. No, he didn’t, but when I described the Polygon to him his eyes flared in recognition.
‘The white one, like a circle.’
‘Yes, the one like a circle. Number 29. A woman called Roma lives there. Can you – just tell her that David Wildeblood asked for her, and that –’ I didn’t know what else to say. ‘Tell her I’ve been hurt.’
He stared at me dumbly a few moments longer. I asked him to repeat the names and the address I’d mentioned, and he got all three. Then I lay down, eyes towards the ceiling. When I turned my head again the boy was gone.
I drifted in and out of consciousness. I knew it was better to try and stay awake, but my fevered body writhed beneath a continuous assault of night frights, a horrible lurching train of faces and figments stalking unbidden across my dreams. Foremost among them Elder, his aspect – half-horse, half-human – glowering over me. Twice, at least, I was startled into waking by the chattering of my teeth. From the street below came shrieks, and the oaths bandied by midnight drunkards; even their racket was preferable to the phantasmal terrors rioting through my beleaguered brain. My breathing had become stertorous, ragged in my chest, and I thought, with regret but no anxiety, that this was how it was to die. Perhaps I already heard them on the stair, but my memory of their approach was the glimmer of a lamp at the door. As I peered, a boy’s thin face coalesced through the grainy dark. Behind him I saw a woman in black – Roma, it had to be Roma – and next to her a man. And at the sight of him I realised my mistake in forgetting to tell the boy: don’t bring the police.
19
Le strade
Un di, felice, eterea,
Mi balenaste innante
E da quel di tremante
Vissi d’ignoto amor . . .
THAT SONG AGAIN. They are singing it everywhere at the moment. I get up from my desk and step onto the balcony, the soles of my bare feet roasting on the smooth tiles. Down below, on the other side of the street stand the organ-grinder and his mate, the latter’s voice a surprisingly mellow baritone. A hand shields his eyes as he looks directly up at me: our gazes meet and, possibly embarrassed, he dips his head in an ingratiating little bow. His face seems familiar. At this hour of the morning the sun makes dramatic angles of shadow on the rearing walls of these narrow old streets. In mediaeval times the city strutted on the stage of European trade. Its name – I dare not write it down, for reasons you will hear. Suffice to say, Italy, to the north.
Perhaps I should be more cautious, given recent events, only the temptation to describe it is irresistible. The three and a half years I have resided here have been the happiest of my life. At first I thought I was merely charmed by the quality of its light, the soft way it falls on things and seems to enhance them. Even the motes of dust it shows teeming on the threshold of the shuttered room where I write, even they please the eye. But then I found myself half in love with the place itself, the vertiginous tenements and their huge oak doorways, the paving blocks placed diamond-wise, the smell of roasted chestnuts and cigars, the portraits of La Madonna tucked into niches, the metallic strains of organ music, and – what most reminds me of Somers Town – the ceaseless theatre of buying and selling. On market days you cannot walk the length of this street without being importuned by at least half a dozen sellers. When I say ‘grazie’ to any of them the reply always comes: ‘niente’. Some mornings you have to dodge around the donkeys, and the goats, tinkling and bleating, just to get fifty yards.
Down below the man has finished the song but still lifts his gaze up here, and now I realise that I have seen him and his organ-grinder before. Yesterday they were loitering outside on the piazza whilst I drank my noonday caffè latte. A week or so ago this coincidence would have gone unnoticed by me – there are many such musicisti wandering hereabouts – but that was before I knew I was being tracked. The man is whispering to his organ-grinder, who nods and glances up here for himself. If these two are indeed spies they are the least subtle of their trade I have yet encountered. I lean down and shout to them, ‘Eh, suonane un’altra. Ecco una moneta!’ I find a soldo in my pocket and flip it down; the man, in a flash, snatches it out of the air, like a frog swallowing a fly. Obediently, they start up again, this time a song I’ve not heard before. It sounds like a funeral dirge.
I could not calculate how many hours I have frittered away leaning my elbows on this balcony rail, watching the life of the street drift by. Frittered? No. Time wasted purely in enjoying oneself is not wasted time. Small things delight me, like the wicker baskets that people lower on ropes from the windows, with the costers waiting on the pavement to load them. Vertical trading! And the different pace of the passers-by. Monks and other clericals step purposefully, like carriers of secret news. Tiny shuffling ladies in black, their faces tan and wrinkled as walnuts. The sauntering notaries and clerks, document cases under their arms. Nobody hurries. Sometimes I see the boy, returning from Mass or the market, stooping to stroke some dust-furred cat (more cats than clerics in this city). His mother will pause to wait for him. They never think to look up here.
I have just been down to the street. I wanted to have a closer look at those musicians, but by the time I emerged they had gone. I fear they too were posted there to watch me. Is my idyll of anonymity unravelling?
But perhaps you wonder how I came to be here at all. Who pulled me from the brink in that miserable dosshouse? Roma, of course. The Irish boy must have made all haste to the Polygon, and having impressed on her the seriousness of my condition offered to conduct her back to Seven Dials. The man who accompanied her was not a policeman, as I thought. She had had the providence to roust out an old ex-surgeon whose hand (thank God) was not yet tremulous with drink. By his ministrations the lead ball was excised and the danger averted, though I had lost some blood. He advised Roma not to move me, so for the next few days she installed herself at my bedside, administering broth and laudanum, with the boy on hand as her willing orderly.
&nbs
p; She had saved my life, but that was only the start. For my life would not have been worth saving if the pursuing furies of Elder and co. had managed to track me down. First, she visited my lodgings in Islington and passed off a story to Mrs Home about my being in a sanatorium, and would it be possible to retrieve some of Mr Wildeblood’s things in the meantime? A payment of four weeks’ rent in advance secured her admission to my rooms, where she packed up my few clothes in a travelling bag. A glance from the top window onto the street confirmed my warning: a man was watching the house. Fortunately she had kept a cab waiting, and before the spy could intercept her on the pavement she was back in the vehicle and on her way.
Once I could stand up and walk about, we discussed ways of escape. London was no longer safe for me. Roma had already seen an artist’s impression of my face on a handbill at King’s Cross police station, and even in a low milieu like Seven Dials there were narks on the lookout to turn you in. I had to get out before the net closed, and Roma somehow arranged that, too. One evening towards midnight a trap was waiting to drive me from the dosshouse (on Shelton Street, I latterly discovered) to Rotherhithe, where a skiff carried me downriver to Gravesend. I was billeted in the upper room of a tavern and told to wait, which I did, for three days, staring at the sluggish flow of Thames trade through the window’s distorting glass. At night the wind rattled at the leaded casements. On the evening of the fourth a knock sounded at my door. I opened it to find Roma. She walked in, and threw off her winter cloak in a businesslike way.
‘You look half perished – here,’ I said, and went to my table to pour a tot of brandy. She took a sip, and went to the window. She stood there, lost in thought for a few moments, then turned to me.
‘You should get your things together. There’s a steamer calling here on its way to Rotterdam. Here’s the ticket – they won’t trace it to you.’
I joined her at the window, and we gazed out at the river glimmering in the dark. The lantern light on a tug bobbed past. If I was going to ask her, it had to be now. ‘Why have you done this for me?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘All this. Saving my life. Saving me from arrest. Getting me out.’
She shrugged, and looked away. ‘I wanted to.’
‘But that day of the funeral, you said you cursed the day I came into your life. I thought you hated me, utterly.’
Head still bowed, she said something, but so quietly I couldn’t hear it. ‘I beg your pardon?’
After an agonised pause, she replied, ‘I said, I’m here, ain’t I?’ Then she did look at me, and said, almost angrily, ‘How could I hate you?’
I wasn’t sure whether her question was in fact a declaration. I took hold of her hand, lightly, and wondered if she could sense my heart trying to punch a hole though my chest. ‘I used to hold conversations with you in my head – can you imagine? I’d daydream all the things I wanted to say to you, rehearse them, and listen to what you might say in reply. But then once I was in your company I couldn’t seem to . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘I think I was scared of you. Still am.’
She smiled. ‘What sorta things did you mean to say?’
‘Well . . . the main thing was – how very ardently I admired you.’
‘That day we saw the butterfly and walked through those woods – d’you remember? – I thought you might say something then. And when you didn’t . . . well, I went back to thinkin’ . . .’
‘Back to thinking what?’
‘You were sweet on her – Kitty.’
‘Kitty?’ I said, startled. ‘No! Why would you – She became a friend to me, of course. I liked her an awful lot . . .’
Her lips formed a thoughtful pout. ‘Well, she was sweet on you. From the moment I set eyes on her –’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘What use was I to an heiress? We could never have been a match.’
‘That’s as maybe – but she was. I could tell.’
And now I thought back to my brief times with Kitty and felt less certain. The curious tone she took on that carriage ride. The eagerness with which she had implored me to dance that night. Had I missed the signs? Then her horrified expression on discovering me with a gun pointed at her father . . . the memory stabbed at me before I could banish it.
‘Feeling wistful?’ asked Roma, who had been watching me.
‘No. A little sad. She must loathe me after what I said about her father . . .’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. You don’t know a woman’s heart.’
I searched her face avidly. ‘That much I would have to admit. Yours has been a mystery to me.’ I took her other hand, and held them in a clasp. I felt a trembling in her. She said, ‘You ought to get ready. There’s a boat on its way.’
‘Roma – please – won’t you come with me? I need you.’
‘You don’t need me,’ she said, shying away.
‘But I do. I don’t see any good in life if it hasn’t got you in it.’
She gave me a sidelong look, considering. ‘What would we do? I don’t know anythin’ but this. How would we survive?’
‘We’d have each other,’ I said, willing her to agree. ‘We could go to Italy – you could see where your family came from!’
She nodded, but her eyes glistened with sadness. Distantly, from the river, came the lowing of a ship’s horn. She gently unloosed her hands from my grasp. ‘I’m sorry. Honestly I am,’ she said, and I believe she was.
I packed up my few possessions whilst she fastened her cloak, neither of us speaking. After settling up with the tavern-keeper – I never learned his name – we walked out into the raw, damp night. The riverbank path was unpeopled at this hour. She walked with me as far as the stairs, at the foot of which a small rowing boat waited. The oarsman raised his lantern to me, and I signalled in return. The steamer had dropped anchor in the middle of the river, awaiting boarders. I turned to Roma, and lifted my hat.
‘Shall I write to you?’
‘I hope that you will,’ she said. At that moment I contemplated throwing myself at her knees and begging her not to forsake me. What did I have to lose?
‘Goodbye then,’ I said, my tongue as dumb and leaden as that anchor on the riverbed.
She nodded slightly, and said, ‘God bless you, David.’ It was the first time I had ever heard her say my name: the first, and I supposed the last. I descended the rain-slick stairs to the landing, and stepped onto the boat, which rocked and righted itself before the man began to ply his oars through the cold black deep. We had nearly reached the steamer when my resistance broke and I looked back. I could see her pale face beneath the hood of her cloak, watching, from a point that seemed as remote and irreclaimable as the past itself.
My journey to this place needs no describing. I did not care to linger in the Low Countries, or in Germany or Switzerland for that matter. Italy was always my destination. No trace of my identity will be found on passenger lists or in foreign lodging houses. Since leaving England I have lived under the name of William Duckenfield, a private tribute to my one-time companion in the workhouse. I have a feeling he would be amused by the appropriation.
Having roamed about in the north I stopped at this city, and after three weeks in residence knew that it was my home. My skin has darkened – this is my fourth summer here – and my hair has gone a strange tawny hue beneath the sun. Wearing a beard that is heavier since Somers Town, I appear to have assumed, unwittingly, a disguise. I now have Italian good enough to be able to do some teaching at the local school, where the pupils call me ‘Signor Weel-yam’. A few months ago I started to write a memoir of my experiences in Somers Town, though I wondered if I were too easily diverted – so much pleasanter just to watch the world pass under this balcony. Now there are more sinister distractions.
I had convinced myself that, after three and a half years, Elder had given up his hunt. In the early days of exile I fancied that spies had been set on me, but nothing of consequence ensued. Perhaps h
e reasoned that I had no evidence of his wrongdoing, and that I would no longer be – what was the phrase? – a stone in his shoe. The few letters I have written to my father during these years always omitted a return address. I could not be sure that Elder wouldn’t try to finagle information from him.
But an incident just a week ago has put me on guard again. In the days prior to it I had conceived a suspicion that I was being followed. I have resided here long enough to spot outsiders from a distance, and the fellow I first saw hovering amongst the crowds at the duomo one forenoon I identified straight away as inglese. If not from their clothes you can tell from their pallor. But this one was not the usual Cook’s tourist type who peers up at the stained glass and helplessly attracts beggars. He was not sweating into his linen or objecting to the price of his guide. I walked once around the echoing nave, stopped to light a candle (I have taken on Romish tendencies) and waited for ten minutes before returning to the entrance. He was still there. No matter, I said to myself, and left the place.
Two hours later I emerged from lunch at the Caffè G— and saw my man lounging by a fountain, apparently taking the sun. Very well: let us see which way the cat jumps. I bent my steps west across the piazza, strolled through a little market and then ducked into a warren of lanes where the noise of workshops boomed in the air. Without looking back I sensed a shadow in my wake. Turning a corner I made a quick dart into an open courtyard. Sure enough, I spied him walk past, stop and look around in puzzlement. I had taken a seat in the yard, pretending to be about my business, when he eventually came through the door himself. He started on seeing me.
The Streets Page 31