“Can I talk to you for a minute, Mr F?”
Yes, said Mr F, hovering on the third step down, yes he supposed he could.
Beauty glanced anxiously up and down Skin Lane again. Mr F was about to suggest heading left and then right onto Queen Street, down towards the alleys and wharves by the river, where they were almost sure to find a corner where they could be alone at this time of day — but the boy was in a hurry. Without even saying Follow me, he turned on his heel and set off sharply to the right; then, after less than a dozen hurried paces, he dodged immediately left again, up through a wrought-iron gate, up four worn Portland stone steps, and straight in through the front door and into the cool air and silence of St James’s church.
Which was a strange place to take a secret.
fifteen
As any architectural historian will tell you, the chief glory of St James Garlickhythe is its light — not for nothing is the building known as “Wren’s Lantern”.
The exterior of the building, however, does little to prepare the visitor for its luminous interior. Like almost all of the City churches, it is — or was, until the widening of Upper Thames Street in 1973 exposed its secrets to four lanes of thundering traffic — a hidden building, one that had to be squeezed into dark, cramped site. If you stand on Skin Lane immediately outside the steps of Number Four and look up, for instance, only the golden cross at the tip of the beautiful urn-crowned tower will be visible above the blank rendering of the high wall that faces you. The height of this wall also conceals the building’s chief architectural sleight of hand — the eight majestic semi-circular clerestory windows which are set into the hipped, slate-tiled roof — the same roof that Mr F could see whenever he looked up from his bench and out of the cutting-room window. For a hundred years, these windows were choked with gloomy Victorian stained glass, but the fires of January 1941 (which mercifully left the building structurally intact) not only shattered them, but also melted the surviving fragments beyond repair. Post-war economy dictated plain glass for the restoration, and so on a sunny high summer’s evening — at ten minutes past six on an evening in late July, for instance — the forty foot high ceiling, which is the highest in the City excepting that of St Paul’s itself, is once again flooded with the clear, all-pervasive sunlight that the architect intended.
Reflected back down from the ceiling into the body of the building, this light makes everything about the structure of the church seem as lucid, as cleanly phrased, as a well-preached sermon. Nothing is concealed.
Beauty, however, was not looking for light; he led Mr F to the one windowless corner of the building. Immediately inside the front door is a gloomy, wood-panelled antechamber, from which a second set of doors leads into the body of the church itself. To the left and right, the rising curves of a handsomely balustraded double staircase lead up to the organ gallery, and underneath the turnings of these stairs are dark corners just big enough for two people to stand in; Beauty chose the darker, left hand one. The double doors leading into the church proper were closed; before Beauty started talking, he checked that he could still see the patch of bright western sunlight that came slanting in through the open front door and across the flagstones of the vestibule floor; if anyone else came up the steps, he wanted to make sure he would see their warning shadow in plenty of time. The corner was cramped, and this meant that the two men were uncomfortably close together. Beauty avoided Mr F’s face, looking instead at the floor. Again, there was no explanation.
“That bitch has tricked me,” he muttered.
It was said with real vehemence, and with the wounded assumption that no one could help but sympathise. Angry as he was, he instinctively kept his voice down — as did Mr F.
“What are you talking about?”
“That bitch Christine downstairs, she’s tricked me. Only tells me this bloody morning she’s bloody pregnant, doesn’t she?”
The boy spat out the words through half clenched teeth, and with his mouth twisted into something approaching a smile — as if they were both supposed to know that this situation was so stupid it was almost funny. From the way he said it, you might have thought the two of them were in a pub, and that he was keeping his voice down so that the words wouldn’t carry over the sound of the jukebox. Mr F expressed no surprise at what he was being told, or at how he was being talked to; he had no idea at all what the boy wanted from him. He waited for a moment, and then used the only instinct which came to hand, which was to be practical. He continued to speak quietly, and gravely; the boy’s replies were quick, and bitter, as if Mr F’s questions were challenges.
“How long has she known?”
“Two weeks, she reckons. Said she was waiting to see if she came back on this weekend, but no fucking luck.”
“Is she sure?”
Only now did the boy’s eyes flash up from the floor — straight into Mr F’s.
“D’you think I’d be bloody talking to you about it if she wasn’t?”
Mr F had never seen him like this before; the eyes were hard as glass, and his mouth thin-lipped. Vicious.
“Is this what were you talking about this morning?”
“Then she tells me it’s me who’s got to sort it out. Reckons her mother’ll kill her otherwise.” The boy sucked at his teeth, and then turned his eyes full on Mr F again; “Haven’t got a fucking cigarette, have you?”
Mr F had, but he didn’t offer one; he knew the boy didn’t really mean it. He watched his face; the way he was biting his lower lip. The way his eyes keep darting away, down to the floor again, as if there might be an answer to his problem down there. Then Beauty took a deep breath, and his face brightened into a strained smile again — as if he felt better now that he’d got all that nonsense off his chest, and felt free to get on and say what he’d really got to say. Before he got to his point, he did his trick of looking Mr F straight in the face, half-raising one eyebrow — like men do.
“Anyway, I’ve decided what to do. You’re going to sort it out. I can’t ask my uncle, he’ll go mad, so you’re going to do it.”
The next pause, of course, was longer.
“And how do you think I’m going to do that?”
“You go to someone and you tell them it’s you got her pregnant. And then you pay for the operation.”
Why isn’t he asking his father for help — Mr F knew the answer, even as he thought of asking the question. Still, he kept his voice low, and patient; he was concentrating, I suppose.
“What makes — ” he faltered, and cleared his throat with a small cough. “I’m sorry. What makes you think I might want to help you?”
“You have to.”
Mr F couldn’t tell if his next line came straightaway, or after a whole minute of silence; all he could think about was how quiet it was in here.
“Do I?”
“Yes, you do.” The boy stopped for a moment, and swallowed.
He’s sure he knows how to do this; he’s seen it done in a couple of films. He just has to keep looking the old boy in the face, and he won’t be able to help himself. Act like you’ve got a big stiff blade in your pocket, he thinks.
“Otherwise, I tell my uncle about you. About the way you look at me. And you lose your job.”
Now there is a very long pause. Mr F looks as though he is weighing up his options; he frowns. The boy tries not to show it, but he is starting to think that Mr F is going to refuse to co-operate, and if that happens, he has no idea what he will do. But as it turns out, he shouldn’t have worried; Mr F already knows that refusing to help this frightened, bullying boy is something he can’t even think of. He isn’t considering his options at all — Mr F hasn’t seen as many films as Beauty has, and certainly none with a scene like this one, and so he has no way of knowing what his options are (one; staggering away from the camera with a heart attack; two, taking a blade or fist across the face; three, being foolishly brave in tremulous close-up). No: the only reason Mr F is taking so long to speak is that he is wonder
ing quite how all of this can be happening to him. Wondering quite how the air can be so still and so thick this evening; quite how this can be him, standing here in this church, hearing and thinking these things. How did he get here?
Beauty misunderstands Mr F’s silence entirely, and is forced to improvise a trump card. A more experienced player might have been better able to disguise how far out of his depth he was when he played it; as it was, Beauty rather overdid the casual swagger, and almost stumbled on his line. His chest-out, chin-up stance barely concealed the fact that he was sixteen, and badly afraid. His sneering mouth told one story, but his urgent, too-bright eyes, another.
“If you do it, you can have me.”
“What?”
“You heard. You can have me. Can’t kill me, can it?”
The longest silence follows. Mr F says nothing. If this was a film, and Mr F’s big helpless face was to be trapped in a close-up at this moment, his expression would reveal nothing. The audience in their darkened seats would only see what a big, strong man he is; what a big man, to be stricken so dumb. If he looks like anything, it is like an ox, chained in the slaughterman’s stall; an ox, the moment before the bolt breaks its skull and its knees buckle. Of course, he knows what the boy means. But his mind is a calm blank.
The boy has to push him. Stupid old goat, he thinks.
“You do want me?” he asks, fiercely
After what once again feels like a very long time — after all, he already knows the answer to the question, and surely might as well just say it — Mr F hears a voice (but not his own, surely?) saying — whispering, almost — hoarsely, but quite clearly, Yes, I do. But the boy doesn’t seem to have heard him. He’s losing his patience; he needs his answer now, so that they can get on to the details of where and when and how much — so he hisses at the old man Go on, say it, and this time, in reply, it is quite definitely his own voice that Mr F hears — absolutely his own voice, speaking up clearly and openly in that cramped, dark space of stone and wood-panelling: no question. He hears himself say it, out loud. Just the two words;
“I do.”
If someone had been there, and had heard him say that to the boy, what unholy ceremony might they have thought they were witnessing? If they had been eavesdropping outside the front door, say, or if they had been sitting crouched and unseen up on the curving staircase above the couple’s heads — well, they would doubtless have had to strain to catch the conversation as it drifted up through the balustrade, but nonetheless, there would have been no mistaking those final words. Mr F said them with as much quiet sincerity as any bridegroom who ever stood before an altar.
sixteen
Mr F had no idea at all what he was supposed to do next. His mind paced around the problem all that afternoon and evening, but could find no point of purchase or entry. He knew such things happened; he even knew they were in the news. He’d read something about it once somewhere — he was sure he had. In the Standard, that was it. He wished he’d read that paragraph properly now, because he couldn’t remember if it had said they were making the law on getting the operation harder, or easier. Easier, probably, he thought. Which was good, he thought. Good for the women — but how did that help him? He didn’t know anyone who would know where to go — and he couldn’t think of anyone to ask, not for the life of him.
Was this something that men were just supposed to know about?
Was that it ?
When, standing in his kitchen the next morning, he finally hit on the solution, it seemed obvious: after all, this girl of Beauty’s couldn’t be the first one at Number Four to have ever got herself into trouble. So at the end of the morning he went down to the machine-room under the pretext of needing to discuss some stock and then, when the last of the girls had left for their dinner-break (Christine didn’t look up from her machine the whole time he was in the room, and he was careful not to stare at her), he simply closed the door and informed Mrs Kesselman that he was afraid he needed her help with something. He didn’t use Beauty’s story that it was him who had got the girl pregnant — that didn’t seem necessary — but just told her that the boy had come to him in genuine distress, and confided in him as the only adult he felt he could turn to in this very personal matter. He said that he felt obliged to do what he could for the boy. He spoke plainly and soberly, as if she could be expected to understand that this was the right way for an older man to speak on behalf of his protégé. It was strange, knowing that she would believe him.
Mrs Kesselman went very quiet for a moment, and held on very tightly to a corner of one of the workbenches — so tightly, the knuckles of her hand went white under her rings. Keeping her face turned away from Mr F, she muttered something vehement in Yiddish under her breath. Even when she spoke up again, she still didn’t turn and look at him.
“Well I can’t say I’m surprised at your story, Mr F. Our young Mr Scheiner, that is one young man I have never liked. Shall you be going to say anything to his uncle, I wonder?”
Mr F said he would leave that to her in due course, but first they had to take care of the girl.
“Yes indeed,” said Mrs Kesselman. Now she did turn round. She looked older; but her eyes were very bright. Her voice was oddly matter of fact, considering how very angry she was.
“I shall arrange the necessary. And perhaps, Mr F, perhaps meanwhile… perhaps you would please to make sure that Christine and I don’t have to be seeing that little boychik of yours anywhere near our machine-room.”
That was it; no further discussion necessary. She would talk to him again as soon as the arrangements had been made.
People sometimes wondered how it was that Mrs Kesselman, with her piled-up hair and black-pencilled eyebrows and small, ferocious body, always managed to think of everything — how she managed to look so tired and so proud at the same time. I think it was because she knew who was really running that building. They say nothing, these women, but they look after their girls. They have to; it’s a full-time job.
Beauty ought to have been terrified, of course — terrified that the girl might corner him on the way home one night and start screaming at him in the street; terrified that his uncle would suddenly appear with a face of stone and ask him to please step down to the office for a quick word. But if he was, he did a good job of concealing it for the rest of that week. Of course, it helped that he thought he was the aggrieved party; in fact, under the circumstances, he thought, he was holding up rather well. When Mr F gave him his brief report on his conversation downstairs, there was a tricky moment, because that did raise the question of Beauty eventually having to keep his promise — to pay up, as it were — but they both knew that there was nothing further to say until Mrs Kessleman had arranged delivery of Mr F’s side of their bargain. Nobody needed to make a scene. Not yet, anyway. He just had to keep out of everyone’s way. Speak when he was spoken to. And meanwhile, of course, he could rely on the fact that no one in the workroom would really even notice that Mr F was being slightly more stern-faced than usual, and that they barely spoke to or looked at each other — why should they? They had their work to get on with, too.
It may sound far-fetched that the two of them simply continued working, in silence, and in the same room, for the whole of the rest of that week; but have you ever stopped to wonder about how many white-faced secrets there are in the buildings around, for instance, where you work?
When, that Tuesday evening, Mrs Kesselman had confronted Christine in the cloakroom after work, she didn’t let her waste too much time on crying, but instead simply advised her (sharply) not to confide her little secret in any of her colleagues. Two days later, she interrupted Mr F at his cutting bench half-way through the morning to ask if he might step downstairs with her for just a moment. On the stairs outside the workroom, having closed the door behind them, she told him that she would be needing thirty-five pounds, in cash, and first thing tomorrow morning. She also took the opportunity to say she’d be grateful if he’d arrange to have that
Russian fox coat passed and dispatched now that the lining was finished, as she didn’t want it littering up her machine-room any longer than necessary. She hoped that young lady wasn’t going to let herself be made a fool of; first Mr Scheiner’s cousin, and now Mr Scheiner’s nephew —
“You see, Mr F, this is where the young people learn it,” she said.
Thirty-five pounds, and first thing tomorrow, she reminded him.
That Friday, the fourth of August, Mr F was late for work again; instead of going straight to Peckham Rye Station, he walked across to Camberwell Green, and withdrew thirty-five pounds from his Post Office account. When he got to Skin Lane, he called into the office and apologised for his lateness, blaming a delay on the trains — that’s one of the things that has changed about Mr F, as I’m sure you’ve noticed; these days, he can lie calmly, without preparation or thought. I expect he wishes he had learnt how to do that earlier in his life. While he was in there, Mr Scheiner finally got round to telling him his bad news, explaining that as from next Monday he was bringing the boy downstairs to be under him in the office for a bit. He was very grateful to Mr F for giving him such a good grounding in the raw skin knowledge — essential in this business as they both well knew — but now the lad needed to start getting the money side of things under his belt.
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