The Rescue Man

by Anthony Quinn

  ‘Hmm. How did you meet, by the way?’

  ‘Er, I saw her one afternoon in the Lyceum.’

  Jack frowned in bafflement. ‘Hang on, I thought you said you were drinking at the Imperial?’

  ‘Yeah, I did. I followed her there.’

  ‘You followed her? Why?’

  ‘I hardly know. I liked her face. She reminded me …’

  His eyes met Jack’s, and the rest of the sentence was understood. Jack sighed ruefully. ‘Oh, Tom … I mean, following strangers. I’m surprised the girl didn’t call the police on you.’

  ‘She might have done, but – I think she felt sorry for me. And she turned out to be a good listener, you know …’

  ‘So you told her about – her?’

  Baines nodded. ‘I’ve never told anyone else, apart from you. It felt odd, really, talking about her, about Richard, after all this time. But it was easier, too, just because she was a stranger.’

  ‘Will you see her again?’

  Baines shrugged. ‘Maybe. She said I could stop by the Bon Marché sometime … I wasn’t sure if she meant it, though. And I don’t know what we’d talk about now.’

  They smoked in silence for a few moments. Baines shifted in his chair: the unseasonable cold was making his leg throb again. There was no forgetting, he thought, whether it was a woman’s face or an ache in his shin – he would never be quit of that time. Fighting the tidal pull of his melancholy he began to ask Jack how his work was going. In the years since the Blitz he had been freelancing for the Corporation, assessing bomb damage and calculating which buildings needed to be demolished. The task of rebuilding, as he told Baines, would require many more years yet.

  ‘Round by the docks it looks hopeless,’ Jack was saying, ‘like one mouthful of rotten teeth after another. You get to thinking it’d be better to knock down the lot and start again. If the city had the money I dare say they would.’ He took a swig of his pint, and cocked his head in an attitude of reminiscence. ‘Odd thing – we were doing a clearance this week on a warehouse in Norfolk Street. A bomb had sheared the whole front off and exposed this wonderful old brick wall – I had a look inside and found – I don’t know what – might have been a church hall. It had these elaborate tiles and pillars, with oriels at either end …’

  Baines, who had only been half listening, felt his attention snap abruptly into focus.

  ‘A church hall – in the middle of a warehouse?’

  ‘Well, I can’t be sure what it is – but it’s a shame it caught so much damage.’

  ‘What will happen to it?’ A bell had begun to toll from some distant avenue of his consciousness.

  Jack shrugged philosophically. ‘They’ll probably pull it down.’

  ‘Can I go and see it?’

  ‘I should be back there next week …’

  ‘No, I mean, can we go there now?’

  Jack stared at him over the rim of his glass. ‘I was quite enjoying –’

  ‘Please – right now?’

  Ten minutes later they had turned at the south end of Hope Street when Baines spotted a tram cresting the brow of Upper Parliament Street.

  ‘Let’s catch this,’ he called to Jack, and as it was pulling away they hopped on to the platform like a couple of schoolboys. While they hung on to the straps inside the swaying car Jack eyed him curiously.

  ‘D’you mind telling me what the hurry’s for?’

  Baines shook his head. ‘It might be nothing at all. I just need to have a look.’

  The tram turned right into St James Street, and they alighted at the church of St Vincent de Paul. Facing them was a grid of sloping narrow streets where Victorian warehouses loomed tall and gaunt, their brickwork a weathered motley of greens, browns, reds, mauves. Jack led the way down cobbled Norfolk Street, whose corner with Jamaica Street had been entirely masked by scaffolding and a baffle wall of corrugated iron. A workman’s door stood to the side, armed with a heavy padlock to thwart trespassers. Baines turned enquiringly to Jack, who had already fished a janitor’s ring of keys from his pocket; following a brief sequence of misinsertions he sprang the lock and they were through. The immediate prospect was dispiriting: they were inside a dank grotto of tumbled blackened bricks, with bent rusted spindles sprouting from a half-shattered wall. Three years of rain had streaked the plaster and a steady drip echoed lugubriously against the floor. Jack walked over to a workbench and returned with a lantern, which he raised to illuminate the interior.

  ‘So, this is one part the bomb destroyed, but see – it’s only a partition wall. If you just step round here …’ Baines followed him through the gloom, until they came to a further wall, this one of well-preserved sandstone, though all of its windows had been bricked up. Jack was now heaving open a metalled door.

  ‘Now, through here …’ he continued, ‘is the hall I told you about.’

  Unusual it certainly was, the walls beautifully tiled in cream and aquamarine, as might have adorned a late-Victorian municipal swimming baths, with a row of oriels set high at either end of the room. The stone flags underfoot were cracked here and there. Above them soared a rib-vaulted ceiling. Baines could see why Jack had thought it might be a church hall, but his instinct nudged him to doubt it – he sensed that it might be an atrium of some kind, perhaps an antechamber to a larger room. He felt his way along the sandstone wall, rimed with moss, until he felt it curve into an embrasure; arched double doors reared up, oaken, studded and faintly churchy, their twin handles cuffed by a looped iron chain of Promethean tenacity. Baines felt its cold weight in his hand, and gave it an exploratory rattle. He heard Jack approach, the lantern’s light swinging before him.

  ‘This is where old Harry would be useful,’ he said.

  Baines was surprised to recall Jack’s ancient handyman. ‘Good God – you mean he’s still around?’

  ‘Of course. And shows every sign of living for ever.’

  It was an impasse. Without a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters there was simply no possibility of getting through the door. Baines paused for a moment, probing the odds of his intuition being correct. There had to be another way.

  ‘You know you said there was a lot of damage. Where else is it?’

  ‘Round the corner on Jamaica Street. You saw all the scaffolding. That’s probably where the bomb landed – blew a bloody great hole through the side.’

  ‘Let’s try it, then.’

  Jack sighed impatiently. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll tell you when I find it.’

  The canvas skin that had been stretched around the scaffolding rippled madly against the wind buffeting along its side. As the wooden platform wobbled slightly Baines had the disquieting impression of stepping along a ship’s gangplank. The first and second ledges disclosed nothing but a tangle of rusty beams and girders. As they made their way up to the third he saw a window which had been boarded up rather than bricked. Closer examination revealed the plywood to have rotted at the edges. He prised a corner away, and the sound of splintering wood suddenly transported him back to the days of heavy rescue. Had he used his time as profitably since? Jack had torn away the remaining veneer, beneath which stared a dull windowpane, its glass warped and mottled by time. Baines picked up the lantern Jack had set down, and thrust its brass base against the pane; the glass made a high outraged twang as it cracked, then a second blow sent a shower of fragments pealing down. He removed his overcoat and laid it over the base where a few glittering shards still spiked the frame. His mobility now reduced, he accepted Jack’s leg-up and clambered on to the sill, where he stood balanced.

  ‘Careful, Thomas,’ said Jack.

  Baines peered into the near-darkness; he could make out the faint gleam of an iron gallery that ran along an enclosure. The drop to it was about ten feet, and before he could begin arguing with himself about the risk he jumped down, and felt a lightning flash of pain shoot up to his knee upon landing. He whimpered quietly, relieved at least to find that
he could still stand. Jack had climbed on to the ledge and stood silhouetted against the light.

  ‘Tom,’ he called, ‘are you all right?’

  ‘Mmm. It’s a longer drop than I thought.’

  Jack’s shadow flew down moments later and landed with a metallic thud, but he rose from his haunches quite nonchalantly, and he also had the lantern with him. The air within seemed sluggish from the years of accumulated dust and neglect. Jack swivelled the lantern through a half-circle; as far as they could tell they were on a second-floor gallery that skirted a long hall. They began to walk along its length, which eventually offered a right turn across the inky expanse of unstirring dark.

  ‘There should be a staircase towards the middle, I think,’ said Baines. His voice sounded small within the monumental stillness. His hand, which had been feeling the way blindly along the balustrade, now clawed only the space in front of him. He was two yards away from the top of a wrought-iron staircase.

  ‘Have you been here before?’ said Jack, the faintest trace of irritation in his tone.

  ‘Never,’ he replied, though he felt an anticipatory thrumming in his blood as he took the stairs downwards, one at a time. He suddenly had the image of himself as a pith-helmeted adventurer groping his way down the steps of a pharaoh’s burial chamber, a flaming torch to hand. Would the treasure be intact, or had it been plundered by tomb robbers long centuries before? Down, down, their footfall clanged against the last few iron steps, and as the sensation of space appeared to expand around them he wondered if he could bear the disappointment of it not being the place he thought it was.

  ‘Give me the lantern,’ he said to Jack, in a voice more peremptory than he had intended. He held it aloft, and on either side they could see walls recessed with alcoves, with slender granite pillars ranged in between, their lower portion decorated with arabesques, while above them a frieze of mythological creatures – a busy menagerie of sea nymphs, griffins, dragons – stretched on into the shadows. Baines was wondering at this riot of elaboration when he noticed that the row of lovingly carved capitals beneath the frieze were all of the same figure, a young man seated, one leg crossing the other, reading a book. And that was the moment he knew. The young man was Frank Eames, the carving taken from a sketch by his brother, Peter Eames, who had redrawn it obsessively in his journal during 1868, the year he conceived the Eames Library – which was where they now stood. He felt the delicious horripilating shock of recognition, of certainty that something which had been lost had now been found. Lost? There had been no record that this building had ever existed, outside of a few feverish pages written near the end of Eames’s all-but-forgotten journal. I could not … He remembered now the architect’s final, uncompleted entry, the point at which his life seemingly began to fall apart. His wife discovered in adultery with his business partner, their separation, the collapse of his finances, the ruin of his hopes. Baines had assumed that Eames ‘could not’ have fulfilled his scheme to build the library, but he was wrong. How glad was he to be! In those last four years of his life he must have – Too many questions were crowding in on him, he needed to investigate the rest of the building, to find out how far exactly this legendary work had progressed. Yet it was a ‘legend’ no longer, he realised with a start; he was now standing on the same tiled floor (breathing the same air!) that its creator once had. He suddenly felt faint, and for a moment feared he might – appropriately, Victorianly – swoon. Handing the lantern back to Jack he stepped over to one of the granite pillars and leaned his forehead against its smooth unyielding cold. He would examine this granite, just as he would all the other stone and brickwork, the wrought iron, the Minton tiles at his feet, this vaulted ceiling above him –

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Jack, interrupting his reverie.

  Baines turned to his friend’s face, pale against the gloom. ‘I’m fine,’ he replied. He was relishing the prospect of telling him what they’d found – the magnitude of it – but for the moment he felt curiously fatigued. It didn’t matter: after seventy-odd years of obscurity the building could wait a few minutes longer for an introduction. Baines thought again of the pith-helmeted adventurer, and recalled Howard Carter’s thrilling account of that famous day in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922, when in flickering candlelight he first peered through the hole into the burial chamber of Tutankhamen. Well … perhaps their discoveries didn’t quite bear comparison. Jack was sweeping the lantern’s interested beam around the hall, and at length said, in a voice that seemed prepared for revelation, ‘So – what are we looking at?’

  Baines felt himself begin to smile. ‘Wonderful things, Jack. Wonderful things.’

  16

  IN THE DAYS following the discovery Baines felt a surge of nervous excitement that others, less guarded than he, might have called happiness. His immediate urgency was to help Jack secure the Norfolk Street site, which necessitated some tedious wrangling with Corporation officials whose natural inclination was to tear the place down. The War Damages Commission argued for this procedure on the grounds that it would provide the city with ‘short-term employment’ – no matter the long-term loss of its architectural heritage. Baines was appalled by this blithe justification of civic vandalism, particularly in view of the scars still evident from the Luftwaffe’s pounding, but Jack had endured such bureaucratic myopia too often to be surprised. The next task was to hire a crew of trustworthy nightwatchmen to guard the premises against looters, who would otherwise be preying on the building’s riches of marble and mahogany and cast iron. No change there, thought Baines, recalling Peter Eames’s exasperation with ‘bluey-hunters’ who stole the lead from roofs to make quick money.

  Even this precaution could not set his mind at rest, and arriving at the site one morning with an old camera that Richard had once loaned him he began to make a photographic record of the library’s interior. The entrance hall, with its swimming-bath tiles, had suffered the most damage, and the south-west corner would have to be almost entirely rebuilt. But the solidity of the sandstone at its front, and the cast-iron stanchions at its rear, had preserved its structure remarkably. The main hall was the beneficiary of this engineering, and once the place was properly illuminated it disclosed the full extent of Eames’s imaginative designs and the craftsmanship that realised them. The architect’s taste for Gothic decoration still flourished, and the repeated capital of a figure, seated with a book, conformed to Ruskin’s principle that a building should speak the truth about itself. But it was counterpointed by a freedom of composition and an extravagant use of space that looked to the Arts and Crafts movement twenty years ahead. News of the discovery was celebrated in specialist periodicals such as the Engineer, which had maligned Eames during his short lifetime but now took leave to acclaim him a pioneer in his use of cast-iron frames and curtain-wall construction. Its article on the Norfolk Street find would eventually be published under the title ‘Victorian Visionary’.

  In the midst of so much dutiful promulgation there was one person to whom Baines was especially eager to communicate the news – and whom he owed a personal debt for alerting him to Peter Eames’s journal in the first place. One afternoon early in May, a few weeks after he had written to notify the Liverpool School of Architecture, Baines was continuing the clearance of the library’s entrance hall when he heard a motor car pull up on Norfolk Street; he heard the engine idling for some moments, then the thunk of the doors closing. He went out and, as he had hoped, saw the frail but determined figure of Professor McQuarrie being helped along the temporary wooden gangway by a young man with brilliantined hair who, his supportive duty complete, nodded briefly to Baines, then returned to the car and drove away. McQuarrie, leaning on his walking stick, saw Baines’s look of concern, and announced in his precise Scots burr, ‘The approach is difficult. The retreat – desirable.’

  It sounded characteristically gnomic. Baines went to offer his arm, but the old man waved him away, perhaps out of pride. In the years since he had last seen hi
m McQuarrie had become quite shrunken, and turkey wattles drooped at his bristly neck; his eyes, which once were gimlet-sharp, now looked milky with age. He was wearing a greenish-brown worsted suit very like the one – was it the same? – he had worn the last time they had met five years ago. Once inside the main hall his spirits seemed to lift in contemplation of the scene, and he offered some drily approving remarks on the room’s proportions and the standard of the workmanship.

  ‘The patterning of light and shade is really very striking. Wherever there’s tracery or screen-work there’s always a window nearby to illumine it. And he seems to throw away the space almost deliberately.’

  ‘Why do you suppose that was?’ asked Baines, genuinely intrigued.

  ‘Think about it, Mr Baines. The library was built in a poor quarter, for people who’d spent their whole lives in cramped cellars and gloomy courts. They’d never known roominess – not even in the pubs and the spirit vaults they went to for a change of scene. Eames made a gift of it to them.’

  ‘It seems to have been designed on a much larger scale than he mentions in the journal. Do you think that was his mistake?’

  ‘I suppose so. You only have to look at the entrance hall to sense how much it would all cost. But Eames never bothered with the economy of a thing. It’s amazing that he got this far with it.’

  ‘His extravagance may have saved it in the end.’

  The professor raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, I had to research the history of the place. At the end of 1872 Eames appears to have run out of money, and the work was put on hold. There was talk that he was raising more funds to continue, he was going to add another floor … But by the following summer it – well, he was dead. The building fell into abeyance – nobody was prepared to take it on – and the site was eventually put up for auction and bought by a building company, called Phoenix Properties.’