The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  Nor were Stokes’s rooms themselves any more appropriate to his station in society. Undeniably the rooms of a deep-thinking man, they exhibited too consistent a squalor to awaken any external admiration. The bare-boarded floor of the passage was invariably stained with the detritus of the streets, with food, and even, Stokes himself claimed, the blood of his victims. The paper the walls were hung with was brown-black and mildewed, and hung off in great limp sheets where Stokes had failed to reattach it with drawing pins. At these lacunae was revealed a damp plaster the unhealthy mottled colour of a corpse’s flesh. The windows were thick with grease and dust, letting no light in and requiring the constant burning of lamps, whose smoking wicks, presumably, added to the thick veil of filth which smeared the panes of glass. Over everything, a thick pall of dust lay; from time to time, under its own weight, it fell from the curtains in massive sausages with a soft thud, like snow from a roof. The piles of books lay, disordered, everywhere, and everywhere, too, the scribbled-on pages of Stokes’s great work, unorganized, unconsidered, almost abandoned in disgust under a further random pile of grease-smeared glasses, the remains of chops, one week old, adhering nauseatingly to the plate, as festering wildlife roamed bravely through the undergrowth of Stokes’s swamp-like rooms.

  Among the filth and detritus, there were, admittedly, some fine things. Most of them you had to fish from the bookshelves and open up to discover – Stokes’s library, despite the pristine unattended chaos in which it subsisted, was a first-rate illumination of what Stokes himself would readily describe as his own first-rate mind. The china was not bought, but family, and was too fine to treat in Stokes’s casual, gentlemanly manner. On the one wall where no bookshelves were, hung a brown and yellow portrait of a man; too dark initially to distinguish in the gloom of the room, but which close inspection showed to be an encrusted and glitter-ingly observant portrait of Rembrandt. ‘Perhaps a Rembrandt,’ Stokes would idly say. ‘Probably – well, not quite a Rembrandt, but not quite not a Rembrandt, either …’ Most people dismissed Stokes easily, but were wrong to do so. There were objects in his room, as in his conversation, which revealed what he, writing in the Dundee Examiner, customarily termed ‘a true nobility of mind’. And then – there they were, unarguably – there were his clothes; and how such a shining fantastic sleek ensemble emerged, at five sharp each day, to confront London and astonish even those old enough to remember Lord Petersham in his prime, was almost impossible once you had seen the stinking midden in which Stokes lived.

  He was lying on the ottoman, swathed as profoundly as a pasha; his nightclothes, a brilliant red, were still beneath there, the collar drawn up against his neck like a scarf. His glittering pointed slippers, curling at the toes like those of some evil genius of the pantomime, were as villainous as a moustache. On his head, a weird fantastic helmet, a terrible oriental crest conjured out of a Chinee cambric square and a soiled yellow nightcap, wound up and round by Stokes’s grotesque unoccupied fancy into the semblance of a turban. He had rolled himself up like a Gloucester bun in an enormous red and green padded robe, which trailed on the floor and lay behind his head like a pillow; what gigantic figure of a man such a garment could have been made for, one could not say, but it dwarfed a Stokes, who lay, a little sulking child, within its Brobdig-nagian folds. With one hand, he negligently riffled the pages of a new book; with the other, he plucked idly at the purple Cashmire shawl flung over the gold velvet ottoman, as if considering whether or not to incorporate that too into his fabulous matutinal ensemble.

  From the staircase came the sound of heavy boots, pounding up. Stokes closed his eyes again, accepting the undesirably inevitable, and settled back. It was no surprise to him that his novel, so long promised, could never get any further; for months now, he had had in mind a fine scene in which the witty and charming Lady Belinda, the independent-minded chatelaine of Marplot Manor, engaged in a chapter-long argument with Arian Callipie-Goss, the humorously wide-bottomed hero who would carry the bitch off at last; how Lady Belinda would wittily defend the popular modern French novel as the highest form of literary endeavour against a satirically-drawn setting of a romantically decaying garden, Stokes could feel without even raising himself to the now tormenting sight of the quill in the inkpot. He had the splendid chapter’s first line: ‘Arian Callipie-Goss was what our ancestors would have termed a gentleman; one troubled with no more profound concerns than the constant vagaries of fashionable metropolitan opinion.’ He had the last line: ‘Lady Belinda’s laugh was more than ever like a bubbling teapot as she vanished with swift entirety behind the gloom of the nearest elm tree.’ He had the whole chapter complete in his head – complete in every respect – and it was the fault of the world and its demands if, rather than that, he had to spend his time in the writing of admittedly very fine and penetrating essays for the Examiner on the folly of Reform, the folly of the acquisition of new oriental possessions, the folly of turning away from the classical virtues in poetry. He opened his eyes to see a blue and white china teapot being set down by his vile manservant, six inches from his head. He looked at it. It made no sound, bubbling or otherwise.

  ‘I see you’ve succumbed to the mysteries of the Orient,’ the visitor said, after half a minute in which Stokes made no sign of recognition, acknowledgement, or even movement.

  Stokes turned his head on the cushion where it lay. ‘Oh, it’s you, Stapleton,’ he said eventually. ‘What the devil do you mean? How do you do? And what in heaven’s name do you want of me that you are obliged to come here?’

  ‘I was talking of your corsair’s attire,’ the visitor said, picking one item out of the list of Stokes’s unremarkably uncivil queries. ‘I came to chivy you out into the streets and meet the fellows at the Club. Do, there’s a good chap.’

  Stokes’s visitor was a relatively young man, so odd in appearance that he appeared perpetually restless, as if he had grown accustomed to contemplating a nascent astonishment in adults and frank alarm in children. Somewhat over six feet in height, he was too prodigious, it seemed, for any tailor to fit with clothes; his hands and feet shot out from his clothes as if they were trying to escape from their owner. Once out of his gloves, his long white tremulous fingers vibrated and twitched like the mandibles of an insect. His eyes, a vague bloodshot watery blue, wandered ceaselessly about the room and his nostrils and mouth rippled up and down from side to side, as if he were keeping some small and active animal warm in there. Only one side of his face was properly shaved. The other had been left in its native state, and was adorned with what the vulgar call ‘bum-fluff’; whether it had been left in such a state of nature through impatience, drunkenness or, as Stokes once ingeniously suggested, because the light in Stapleton’s bedroom fell only on one side of his face, and he felt unequal to the requirement of trusting his own, vaguely trembling right hand in darkness, seemed propositions equally probable. It was his cockscomb of hair, however, which made the London streets stare, and the rudest of the street-arabs throw stones and jeer; a brilliant white-blond shock, standing straight up on the left side, as if Stapleton had just that moment woken up from a long and refreshing sleep in a pool of sugar and water. His claim on the notice of the public was that he had written something between five and ten novels; he lived at Chelsea. It was said that he had contracted an imprudent marriage with a placid Cambridge barmaid, but none of his friends had ever seen such a creature. There were those who affected to believe that such a woman could not exist. Stokes said bluntly that, if she existed, she could only be Stapleton’s nurse.

  ‘I fail to see,’ Stokes said, ‘what you mean by my “corsair’s attire”. I was always rather an enemy to the fashionable Orient. I was never, indeed, east of the City in my life.’

  ‘Very good, Stokes, very good. The mysterious promise of Essex, eh? The great rubies of Hornchurch? The harems of the nabobs of Kent? The opium dens of, of, of …’

  ‘The opium dens of Shadwell? There are, of course, opium dens in Shadwell, Stapleton. Yes, v
ery good, excellent, quite, quite,’ Stokes interrupted, since, once Stapleton’s fancy had been caught in an idle way, he could continue weaving, quite happily, for hours. ‘What, I said, do you want of me?’

  ‘A social call, dear boy, merely that, merely that,’ Stapleton said. ‘I am quite hurt, quite hurt. I say, I heard of you bearding the lion in his den. Splendid, splendid. Or not in his den, to be honest, the den of the old dam – the old lioness huntrix – the old – er – at the Duchess’s, I mean. On Tuesday.’

  ‘At which Duchess’s? Look here, Stapleton, what do you want?’

  And now Stapleton really looked hurt. He reached out for the teapot Mullarkey, the manservant, had brought in. It was hot and full, but there were no teacups to hand. He set it down again. ‘I only called in to see if you felt like a spot of dinner with the fellows at the Club. Now, Stokes old man, do get out of your Arabian Nights’ garb and come with me, and pretend for one moment that you belong to the more civilized portion of the human race, and not to some un-Christian tribe of Hottentots, of Moguls, of, of, of Editors, there’s a good fellow.’

  This was the proper line to take with Stokes. His immediate response was to pull the Cashmire shawl entirely over his head and groan powerfully. Stapleton recoiled physically in his chair; his long and pale-jointed fingers flailed with violently ineffectual purpose as if at some invisible game of cat’s-cradle. It seemed to him that Stokes’s huge groan was one of gathering strength, and might be followed by an outburst of violence. But Stokes, in practice, reserved his outbursts and attacks for the livid pages of the Dundee Examiner, and in a moment he threw back the shawl. He glared balefully at Stapleton, sighed heavily and rolled his eyes.

  ‘I expect you think this is fair treatment of one who first gave you the opportunity of placing your work before the public,’ Stokes said eventually.

  ‘Now, now, Stokesy, fair dos, old man,’ Stapleton said. Then he thought better of it, perhaps recalling that ten years after that auspicious event, he had seen eight novels appear under his name while Stokes, so brilliant in promise, had yet to appear in the bookseller’s lists in any other guise than an anonymous commendation of another’s work. ‘Opportunity – too poor a word, old man! Gave me an opportunity? Gave me expectations, my dear fellow! Why – you discovered me!’

  ‘Quite so,’ Stokes said, rising from his slumping ottoman like the uncreated Adam in a particularly preening mood. ‘And now I propose to go and dress, after which I shall be quite at your service. Old man.’

  Into the innermost recesses of his diggings, its most intimate chambers and antechambers, swept Stokes, leaving the dusty air hovering with mild indignation; wrapped in his red and gold and green negligé, his ruby and emerald déshabillé with cap and turban and all, he carelessly took with him the shawl over the ottoman which his left hand still clutched, and in his wake, a whole pile of books and knives and plates teetered for a second before crashing explosively. A great fountain of untouched dust rose up from the catastrophe, unremarked by Stokes, and Stapleton was left twitching, as all the dust in the room rose, and shivered, and furiously danced in the lamplight. ‘Occupy yourself,’ Stokes called back, departing from the scene of his grisly levee. ‘Ten minutes, my dear fellow, ten minutes. Mullarkey!’ And the manservant, solemn and slow as an acolyte, emerged from the scullery to attend the mysterious rites of his master’s wardrobe.

  3.

  Stokes was as good as his word in the matter of the ten minutes, although how the shining fresh dandy with his brilliant white linen and sparkling pink face could have emerged in so short a stretch of time from the shambling man-midden by any process less radical than peeling, Stapleton could not claim to conjecture. As they left Stokes’s rooms, the ageing pageboy standing at attention by the door to contemplate, with sinister complacency, the fruits of his labours, Stapleton had the sensation of being hauled up forcibly from the dank and slimy depths of a stagnant pond. They passed from Flat Hand Yard through the complex series of alleys, gennels, runnels, dry and semi-dry sewers which led back to the Strand, and Stapleton could only feel, contrasting his own rusty frock coat and dun-coloured, stained and abjectly frayed breeches with Stokes’s immaculate polish, that their exit from so insalubrious a quarter must provoke, in the multitudes of the Strand, a curiosity bordering on a sensation.

  ‘I hear you have a new novel out, Stapleton,’ Stokes said when they had attained the Strand with, it seemed to Stapleton, remarkably little fuss. A small group of beggar boys, grinning vilely, now assailed the odd brace. ‘No, no, away, off with you, you know better than to trouble me. Well, Stapleton?’

  ‘I do, indeed. Next month, I believe.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent. What a busy person you must be, in your cottage in Chelsea. And the title of the forthcoming work?’

  ‘Zoe. It’s a romance of old Byzantium, you know, Stokes. Jolly interesting – the subject, I mean, not the novel, I couldn’t honestly speak for the merits of—’

  Stokes paused for a second, knocked his cane hard against the wall of the Bag o’Nails inn to dislodge some detritus, and took his hat off for a moment. ‘Unseasonably hot, ain’t it?’ he said. ‘I put my hat upon my head/And went into the Strand/And there I met another man/Whose hat was in his hand.’

  ‘Jolly good, Stokes, impromptu like that.’

  ‘Merely quoting, old man,’ Stokes said, evidently gratified by his own honesty. ‘Remind me – what was the subject of your last novel?’

  ‘Uggdryth? Oh, that, Stokes, oh, a romance of life among the Vikings. I meant to get them to invade Britain, but, you know, in the end, they were so interesting that—’

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘You must remember that one, surely? I think you had the goodness to notice it in the Dun Eggs. Medieval China.’

  ‘I remember, now you jog my poor fading memory. Very pretty – willow trees and pug dogs and the girl threw herself into a brook. And before that?’

  Stapleton thought hard; his fecundity impressed and baffled him, whenever he was brought to contemplate it. ‘Abyssinia,’ he said finally.

  ‘A romance?’ Stokes said.

  ‘Among the early Christians there,’ Stapleton agreed.

  ‘Did you find it necessary to travel to that benighted realm?’ Stokes asked gravely.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Stapleton said. ‘All out of books, you know, Stokes. Well, I’ll square with you on that one like a chap; it was all out of three pages of Gibbon, and the rest—’ Stapleton began to flutter with his hands as he suddenly wondered what end Stokes had in mind in examining him so seriously on his literary works, ‘—I say, Stokes, you’re not quizzing me, are you?’

  ‘Not for the world,’ Stokes assured him seriously. ‘And the rest – where did you acquire so broad a knowledge which, surely, must have proved necessary to the writing of such an informative volume?’

  ‘Oh, I made it all up,’ Stapleton said. ‘Invented. The whole caboodle, anthropophagy, sacred tigers, ritual dances with cowcumbers, all of it. Did very well, so my bookseller assures me. All out of my noddle.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent,’ Stokes said. ‘You didn’t even feel the need to consult Bruce? Well, you know best. Here we are.’

  So it was that Stokes and Stapleton entered the Club with startlingly different countenances; to anyone in the room, since they were all mutually acquainted, what had passed between them would have been immediately apparent. Stokes’s bland and sleek severity was one he only attained immediately after the melancholy necessity of conveying some very bad news, like a pagan priest returning, clean-handed, from a human sacrifice. Stapleton, judging from the twitching, flailing, blood-drained expression of horror, was the recipient of Stokes’s worst. It did not take the Club long to come to the correct conclusion that Stokes had some moments before found a way to assure Stapleton that his newest production was to be handed what the Club informally termed ‘a stinker’; that Stokes, for reasons of his own, had decided that, in the opinion of the Dundee Examiner, St
apleton would not ‘go’, under any conditions. The sympathy of the Club, befitting literary men, flowed directly, if discreetly, to Stokes the assassin.

  4.

  The manners of the Club were that dinners were ordered, and eaten, without reference to one’s fellows; so a gathering of the Club would last for some hours, and at any moment only one or two of the members would be eating, the others sitting back, discussing, and smoking. The other convention of the Club was that its doings and discussions were not referred to subsequently, that conversation should be free and unconfined. Stokes was famous for remarking, witheringly, to a very junior member of the Club who had thought to refer to some former conversation over dinner in society that ‘Gentlemen, when they meet each other in a mauvais lieu, do not customarily boast of the fact, or so I had believed.’ In no other area of discussion was this freedom so generously exercised as when the conversation turned to the subject of prospective members of the Club.

  ‘I have an inclination,’ one of the younger members was venturing, ‘to propose Mr Carrington for our little society.’

  ‘The fellow who went to Canada?’ Stapleton said. ‘Yes, indeed – a very amusing fellow.’

  ‘I read his book,’ Stokes started, but so quietly that no one paid him any attention.

  ‘A great diner-out, at any rate,’ Carlyle said. ‘I meet him everywhere, and everywhere he dances attendance on me, and flatters and flirts with me so prodigiously I blush like a virgin of sixteen. Yes, I like him excessively – there is nothing more appealing than deference in the young towards their betters, I find.’

  There was a general sniggering at this favourite joke, since Carlyle was the oldest young man yet seen in London.