by Louis Bayard
—What put him in such a fury?
—I can’t say.
—Anything to do with that naked old cove running up the stairs last night?
Oh. Oh, I’d quite forgotten that.
—No. Squidgy’s quite benign.
—Happy to know someone is.
I am walking now, and it feels so good I find myself circling the table, just as George was doing a few minutes ago, but without the same confident stride—just my own interrupted cadence.
—Listen to me, Colin. I’ve been giving some thought to our, our little business relationship.
—Oh?
—I’ve come to believe that it might be in everyone’s best interests if we…if we concluded it. For the time being.
—What for?
—Well, I think you’d have to agree it’s exhausted its usefulness, in a sense. For now. Which isn’t to say you haven’t been helpful—far from it. You’ve been, you’ve been indispensable, and I don’t know what I would have…really, I can’t tell you how—
—Is it George? Coz he’s all air, that one. He don’t scare me a bit.
—It’s not George. It’s just that the stakes have got a little higher than any of us expected, and I’m feeling, I suppose, answerable in a way I wasn’t before. And as a consequence, I think it might be time to call in some institutional help.
—You mean the police?
His tone is every bit as scornful as George’s was.
—Perhaps the police. I’m not sure.
Colin jams the cigarette back into his mouth and sucks on it until his whole face is fuming like a smokestack. Then he allows himself a luxuriant cat stretch.
—Well, so fuckin’ be it. We had us a good run, didn’t we, Mr. Timothy? But a man has to know when his time is up, don’t he? You won’t see me wringin’ my titties over it.
—I’m glad you—
—Anyways, I got me a date with my old mum.
—Your mother?
I don’t know why I should be so astonished. He’s already mentioned a father, and all humans have mothers, don’t they? Did I think he’d sprung full-blown from the brow of London?
Well, yes. In a manner of speaking, I did. My surprise must be writ across my face, for Colin quickly adds:
—Oh, she’s still about. Somewhere. We got this arrangement, see. Every time I come in to a bit of change, I stop in and give her some. It’s a little like tithing, ain’t it?
—I didn’t…well, I mean to say, that’s very good of you, Colin. To think of her.
He waves me off with his cigarette.
—She gets a better class of gin for a few days, that’s all. Not that she notices.
Even this tiny glint of revelation is too much for him. He bounds to his feet, cocks his head towards the doorway.
—You making for Captain Gully’s? he asks.
—For a while, yes. Then I’m off to see my uncle.
—Uncle who?
I don’t answer. I just tap him lightly on the shoulder and point to the door.
On our way out of the dining room, we encounter another early riser, and not a welcome one. Iris stands by the banister, already in her morning dress, with her arms folded across her chest like a harem eunuch and her face frozen in an attitude of suspended relish. There seems nothing to say but:
—Good morning, Iris.
To which she has a riposte already prepared, it is clear, but it never materialises, for Colin chooses this moment to grab a healthy chunk of her arse. Whether he molests anything beyond several layers of petticoat I cannot say, but Iris is sufficiently put out to swing her right arm in the general direction of his face. Foreseeing this, Colin has already ducked and squirmed his way through, and when next I see him, he is skittering towards freedom, half crawling, half skating. The door slams behind him before Iris has even realised he’s gone.
And with that slam comes an odd twinge in my gut. Absurd. Absurd to expect a formal adieu from Colin the Melodious. He sees his chance, he moves on.
Iris, too, is moving on. It takes her a few seconds to recompose herself, but when she turns back to me, the air of triumph has returned, and so has the arch smile, biting hard at the corners of her mouth.
She presses the backside of a playbill into my palm.
—What’s this?
—What does it bloody look like? An invoice. You don’t suppose you could pinch something of mine, and me not know it?
It’s not what I would have expected from her, and I have enough presence of mind to note that the handwriting is not Iris’s, nor is the language:
Iris Tulliver hereby demands £2 in remuneration
for the theft of one red ribbon from complainant’s dresser
How could I have forgot? The ribbon. The one I gave Philomela back in the graveyard. Still adorning her hair, last I checked.
—Two pounds seems rather dear, Iris. Even by your standards.
—The sum in question takes into account the lost hours of sleep, not to mention the disturbance of having a strange man prowling about, howsoever unthreatening he may be.
I fold up the invoice, tuck it neatly in my waistcoat pocket.
—Thank you, Iris. I’ll give it the most careful consideration.
—You’d best do more than that, lest you want the madam knowing of your perverted ways.
—Mrs. Sharpe has seen far worse perversions than ribbon stealing.
—Oh, the ribbon is the least of it, I’m sure.
That last remark will haunt me more than perhaps even she could have guessed. I leave Mrs. Sharpe’s house, I pass down Pall Mall, I sidestep an overflowed water plug, I drop a coin in the cup of a blind violoncello player, the muffin man’s bell rings out—and it all might as well be a painted backdrop from Peter’s photography salon, I barely hearken. I am too engaged in the cataloguing of my sins.
A dismal registry, now that I look back on it. Nothing remotely cardinal. Only a chain of malices and fancies and foreshortened desires.
Pinching Jemmy in the neck once when she complained about having to carry me to the table.
Finding Sam’s body in the canal and not telling anyone.
Wishing sometimes that Mr. McReady would come back.
Telling Martha her new husband looked like a boil.
Copulating with a black-toothed woman in a St. Giles mews.
And hating my parents for having the temerity to be my parents. And for keeping me in Camden Town, when there were boy pharaohs to see and racetrack-card vendors to meet and Greek myths to be conned and a whole world waiting to wrap its arms around me.
Well, that’s the best I can come up with on short notice. Not a hanging offense in the whole bunch, just the slow, steady attenuation of a soul.
So here I stand, prematurely aged on a young day. Yesterday’s wind has blown in the sun, and a gentling hand has been laid over the Strand’s commotion, granting a quality of reprieve to one’s knuckles and toes and ears. Even the fog has ebbed to half its normal density. Trees, seen up close, reveal their full complexity. It is only farther off that their outlines begin to soften and blur, until the very notion of outline loses its meaning, and one could imagine that the whole world was at sea and these trees were simply the masts of ships, and the sounds of dead leaves chattering around the lampposts the rustle of surf.
In a fog such as this, shapes don’t just appear; they seem to be forming on the spot from the materials of one’s own mind. Behold! a coster’s donkey. Lo! a woman with a parasol. A billboard advertisement for Foster’s Vintage Ports. An abandoned brazier.
And Father. Mustn’t forget Father.
Today he has metamorphosed into a dealer in fancy-ware, stationed near St. Martin-in-the-Fields. A rather fashionable location for your common swag, and the merchandise is pitched accordingly high. Lovely scarf pins and display vases and gilt frames. Leather and bead purses, plated jewelry. A pair of coloured-glass sleeve links in the shape of mastiffs.
Father takes justified pride in the
se goods. Note the gently proprietary pose of his hands as they rest on the barrow. I would recognise those hands anywhere. The face, too, for that matter, even if it is disguised in a chest-length beard.
The voice, though, is foreign. So unalterably foreign it stings.
—Ah, I see you got your eye on the eardrops, sir. Take my word for it, they makes a lovely lady even lovelier.
And in this manner, Father vanishes as abruptly as he appeared. And just when I was ready to pepper him with questions:
How is the post where you are?
And have you bumped into Serafino Rotunno?
And just what are the dead afraid of?
I shall have to write them all on a piece of paper next time, and hurl it straight into his ectoplasmic heart.
—Why, we never knew we had so much grime about us, Tim. Boggles the mind, don’t it?
So says Captain Gully, standing fully erect on his chair while waves of domestic industry wash at his feet. Philomela, sporting yesterday’s trousers, has just swept under the chair, having already beaten the hearth rug and swept away the ashes, and now, without a moment’s respite, she throws herself onto all fours to swab the metal surfaces of the fireplace with blacking. In between the rubbings of the rag, I can hear her brief exhalations; I can see her pinked complexion and the lines of sweat leaching through her temples. Going at it with every fibre of her being, is our Filly, and I know enough of her not to be surprised. She has to earn her room and board somehow, doesn’t she?
The amusing part is how Gully keeps pointing her out to me—with his whole arm extended, as though she were a comet or a zoological specimen.
—We’ll have you know, Tim, before dawn, before we was even out of bed this mornin’, this’n was heating the copper and scrubbin’ the bejeezus out of our shirts. Look at ’em, Tim! They’re positively holy!
It’s true. Gully’s still-damp shirts billow in the open window like the suspended bodies of priests. They have left a film of perspiration over everything in the room: tabletop, chairs, globe, scrimshaw, even Gully’s upper lip.
—We says to her, we says, “Come away, lass, there’s no need, so early in the day.” And she gives us such a look as though to say, her English not being what ours is, Why, what better time is there? And Gully knows he’s a beaten man, he does, so he gives her free rein, don’t he? And blessed if she don’t take to the work like a hog to shit.
—Well, it’s delightful, Captain, to see the two of you getting on so famously.
—Oh, we’re boon companions, that’s what we is. Ain’t we boon companions, now, Filly?
A slow, abiding nod from the scrubbing girl. She must have been asked this question many times in the past twenty-four hours.
—Last night, we was playin’ a bit of casino, Tim, and it took her maybe three rounds to get it down. To the point she was slaughterin’ us by the end of the evening! And then, ’fore that, we had a go of backgammon. Natural genius, Tim. There she was, just a few particklers of instruction, and lo and behold and never say die, she was a-leapfroggin’ over us ’fore the hair could even settle on our head. Weren’t you, now, Filly? A bloody prodigy, weren’t you?
Another nod.
—Not that we lets her out of our sight, Tim. Oh, perish the thinkin’. Why, if there’s water to fetch, it’s Gully as does it. If there’s cold pork ’n’ beans or sherry to be got, why, Gully’s your man. Never goes out but by the back way. Always looks both directions lest he’s being shadowed.
He demonstrates it for me. Swivel, swivel.
—And mind you, every time we comes back, don’t you think we uses a Secret Knock? So she knows it’s Gully and not some malfeasor? Look, we’ll as good as show you.
He disappears into the outer hallway. A pause of five seconds and then a gentle tattoo on the door, recognisable (from its metre alone) as the opening bars of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
And then, on cue, Philomela’s voice, articulating with the greatest care:
—Come in, please.
At which invitation the door swings open to reveal Gully, beaming from his soles on up.
—You see, Tim? Works like a charm, every blessed time.
The next hour passes like the most benign of factory shifts. Gully hums his fragments of Christmas carol and scans the paper for corpses (“Oh, now this’n looks promisin’, a leaper off Blackfriars. Can’t have drifted far, can he?”). Philomela dusts the globe and the scrimshaw collection and the pile of atlases and plumps herself down by Gully’s chair to clean her boots. Rotating divisions of cats brush against the furniture, leap from the windowsill, or simply gaze about in a fog—perplexed, I imagine, by the peace that has dropped on them like mercy.
And Timothy? He leans against the wall. Lets his thoughts rove at leisure.
Invariably, they come back to the same place, to the fancy-ware dealer outside St. Martin’s. My mind keeps stretching, elongating itself, as I try to remember if there was anyone else in the picture. Anyone I should have been on the alert for.
—What did your father look like, Philomela?
She looks up from her polishing. The word lolls on her tongue:
—Look…
I point to my face.
—His features. What did he look like?
She shrugs, makes a sketching motion with her hand. That’s all it takes. Within seconds, Gully has procured the necessary items: a quire of paper, a pen, an inkwell. Philomela seats herself at the table, cautiously dips the pen, makes a few preliminary scratches, then abruptly crumples the sheet and begins again.
From there, it is a largely unhindered progression of short, sharply etched lines. Occasionally we hear her make a muffled cry over an errant mark, but for the most part, she works steadily, and as the minutes pass, her wrists loosen and her hands range with greater freedom across the paper, and before we know it, Serafino Rotunno is reborn, in all his Calabrian splendour. Fairly bursting from the page, he is: the round, wide-set eyes, made all the more watchful by the receding brow; the half smile, with its uneven rows of teeth; the tiny dimple in his chin, like a thumb pressed lightly into peat.
—My father, says Philomela.
No particular inflection in her voice. Simply stating it for the world’s benefit.
Gully, entranced, leans over the table, whispering into the paper.
—Oh, me. She’s got the gift, though, ain’t she?
It is impossible to deny, and impossible to define. Working without charcoal or paint, she has nevertheless created her own shading, her own colour. An alchemy of ink. How mysteriously her subject emerges from the paper. And how pleased the subject would have been to build a frame for it.
—Tell me, Philomela. Can you draw the man who was chasing us? The one in the bowler hat?
She frowns, then sets to work. More false starts this time, more sheets sacrificed to her displeasure, and even when she is finished, she must hold it up to the candlelight for another minute before she is ready to part with her creation.
The sight of it sends a shard of ice through me. She has caught him in the moment of our first meeting. The roundish face, with its narrow brown eyes and the barest glimmer of a grin. The hard topknot of the hat.
And the wood-carver’s blade, agleam and almost afloat—an obelisk of steel.
—Excellent likeness, Philomela. May I keep it for the time being?
She nods.
—And now…what of the man in the carriage, Philomela?
Oh, I should have expected it. The old eraser, wiping her face clean before anyone can stop it.
—The man who wished to take you away, Philomela. I need you to draw him.
She shakes her head.
—I may not.
—It would be a great help if you could.
—My hand. It won’t…
But her hand looks quite purposeful as it descends into the pocket of her newly acquired trousers, clasps its small bundle, and reemerges with fingers fluttering.
The rosary beads.
—It’s all right, Philomela. You don’t have to draw him.
She is calmer when I turn round; the litany has done its work. Indeed, I would go so far as to call her completely serene at the moment she looks up at me and says:
—We kill them.
The contrast between those words and the holy relic in her hand is so pronounced it fattens my tongue, numbs my lips. A line of bluster trails from my mouth.
—Well, no, we may…we may bring them to account, yes, but we cannot presume to…that is for the ministers of justice and…and for God….
—Or they kill us.
And what is there to say to that? So many things. Nothing. I sink into Gully’s chair, and he takes the chair opposite Philomela, and the three of us lapse into silence—broken only at intervals by the plaints of cats, circling the furniture and snagging threads of rug and brushing against our trousers.
And then, in a quick hot burst of empathy, Gully reaches for Philomela’s shoulder, strokes it gently.
—There, there. Won’t be no need for a-killin’, dear one. Not while Gully’s in the crow’s nest.
The look she gives him then produces an instant echo in my mind. It is an exact replica of the look George gave me earlier—that strange, fleeting pity, but with a new element this time: consolation. Poor man, she seems to be saying. I don’t have the heart to tell you.
And so she goes back to polishing her boots.
Chapter 15
SOMEONE HAS TIED A WREATH round the gargoyle on Uncle N’s door, but this has in no respect limited the creature’s omnipotence. If anything, it is simply the tribute a downtrodden world pays its conqueror, and even Mrs. Pridgeon, opening the door with her usual ponderousness, is, in this setting, nothing more than a handmaiden to the great gargoyle god. A lifetime of submission is stamped on her stooping shoulder.
—Good afternoon, Master Cratchit.
—Is my uncle about?
The barest of shrugs, as though to say, When is he not? She leaves it to me to close the door and immediately makes for the stairs.