‘Before we say goodbye, Mr Seymour,’ said Barnard – in a top hat, of an expensive make, such as he would wear when visiting his banking associates in Lothbury, and from which various fishing lures were hanging – ‘I know you came here because you are illustrating Richard’s Maxims – but could I trouble you to make a drawing for me?’
He handed Seymour a black leather portfolio. There were pages of manuscript within, and crude pictures of angling calamities. The first showed a man casting, but as the rod drew back, the hook sank into the cheek of a passer-by, and as the line pulled taut it produced an agonising cone of flesh. Another showed an angler jumping a stream, and was entitled: The sudden realisation that the weight in one’s pockets makes it impossible to reach the opposite bank.
‘If Richard can publish on the humorous side of angling,’ said Barnard, ‘then so can I.’
He took a handful of sovereigns from his pocket and passed them discreetly to Seymour.
‘Have a look through these pages, and see if the writing inspires you. My drawings are not at your standard of course, but with a good picture from you at the front, my pictures might do for the rest. Just leave the material with Mr Sherry when you are finished. Ask him to add a sherry, or whatever you like, on my account too.’
‘Do you have a publisher in mind for this?’
‘Not exactly. There is a scientific gentleman I know, and he has been involved with publication in a small way. Well, with the Transactions of the Geological Society of London, at least. When the work’s finished, I shall probably ask his advice.’
After he had shaken hands with the club members, Seymour sat with Barnard’s papers, and a sherry. He read a statement about the behaviour of the Putney puntites, recalling the conversation of the previous day. ‘They are a sect of piscatorial philosophers whose aim is to conduct a series of experiments on solids and fluids, as well as investigating the nature of the particular gas which is evolved from the best Dutch tobacco.’
There was something interesting here, behind Barnard’s words – the idea of the angler who was not truly captivated by fishing, but used a punt merely as a floating inn, to eat, drink and smoke. Seymour began sketching a picture of a fat man in a punt, a man of his favourite bespectacled type. The man was asleep, a bottle of liquor prominent in the hull, unaware in a drunken stupor that the rod was bent under the strain of a fish on the hook.
Then Seymour stopped. He should not waste this idea. He could do more with a Putney puntite than simply hand it over to the man with interests in the banking district of Lothbury.
Seymour looked briefly through the other pages of manuscript. How much of the material would fascinate the public? Very little, he suspected. It was the same with the Houghton Club chronicles. There was worthwhile material, but it would require editing to be at all readable.
Instead of the Putney puntite, he drew an angler astride a huge fish, riding it like a jockey, with a fishing rod substituting for a whip. Then he finished his sherry, handed the material to Mr Sherry, and left the hotel.
*
It was the middle of December, and the middle of the morning, when Charles Stokes, of the Geological Society of London, heard a knock when sitting, bearded and unkempt, in the middle of his study in the Verulam Buildings, Gray’s Inn.
He did not appreciate the interruption. He had just added to his journal an account of a conversation with another geological gentleman on the subject of the steady accumulation of minute changes which, over the great expanse of time, had produced the layers of the Earth. He had been helped in this process by a tankard filled with the excellence of Reid’s brewery, from the corner of Liquorpond Street and Leather Lane. He raised the tankard to his lips, sat poised, and waited to see whether the knock would repeat.
It did. So there was no alternative but to negotiate his way through his surroundings.
On shelves and stands were a profusion of items, many bearing labels: fossilised trilobites, coprolites and sections of tree bark; dried plants, stuffed toucans and floating animal foetuses in jars; minerals, crystals and seashells; coin cabinets with drawers left open; extensive bookshelves with works of learned societies; paintings both upon the walls and standing stacked against each other; Buddhas, elephant gods, busts of composers; and miscellaneous decorative snuffboxes. There was no apparent classificatory principle at work behind this collection – it was a collection of everything. There was also a stale odour present, but whether it emanated from Stokes, or from the contents of the room, is a question it would be difficult to reach a scientific consensus upon.
A fair-headed boy stood at the door, who by the look upon his face now experienced this enigmatic odour for the first time in his life. The boy handed over a parcel, his arms at full length, and two letters addressed to Charles Stokes, FSA, FLS, FGS, FRAS, saying, ‘I’m the new porter’s lad.’ Whereupon he departed as fast as he could.
Stokes dodged and zigzagged to his previous position. He read the two letters first. They both asked questions about geological specimens in his possession – and within an instant, Stokes had found them, as though he possessed in his mind a perfect catalogue of his study’s contents. Then he opened the parcel.
It contained Barnard’s work on humorous aspects of angling. Quite why this gentleman should ask Stokes’s opinion on such matters puzzled Stokes himself. But as he had asked, Stokes would respond.
‘The account of accidents has too much the character of individuality – too much the jokes of a coterie for publication,’ he wrote in his reply. Then he added: ‘Of course, you do not mean to give all the drawings.’
Edward Barnard’s Angling Memories and Maxims remained unpublished, its impression upon the world no more than the traces it left in Robert Seymour’s mind.
*
‘IT HAS BEEN SO LONG since we mentioned that boy in Chatham, who was so fascinated by clowns, that anyone would think I had forgotten him,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘I have decided I shall call him Chatham Charlie. It is time we talk of him again.’
*
HOLY WEEK, A MILD EVENING.
There was a gentle breeze among the gravestones, slightly disturbing the grass, as the boy and his father neared the porch of St Mary’s. The father pointed to the curious details of a stone tablet built into the entrance of the church, showing Euphrosyne of the Three Graces – goddess of mirth, good cheer, joy, merriment and festivity.
‘She filled the earth with pleasant moments,’ said the father.
The boy was absorbed by the sight of the ancient tablet, for some pleasant moments; but there were other pleasant moments urgently pressing to be enjoyed, because a stroll had been promised before the service, and he tugged his father’s hand. They turned from the porch, and the boy pointed towards a ship’s mast, for the church was built upon a chalk cliff overlooking Chatham Dockyard. They proceeded along an alley which ran beside St Mary’s called Red Cat Lane, rumoured to be the oldest in Chatham. If anywhere in Chatham were haunted, it would be this lane – perhaps by bloody, ghostly cats, but definitely by frowsy women standing outside cottages, one of whom clicked her mouth as they passed.
‘Just keep going, Charlie,’ said the father.
The alley led to the water and to fishermen’s dwellings, where sun-beaten and creased faces poked from doors; but these faces were not as disturbing to the boy as one drawn in chalk upon a door.
The face belonged to a goblin-like figure, smoking a pipe. It wore a large hat, and had long ears that protruded parallel to the brim. The chalked mouth grinned from one ear to the other, and the goblin’s eyes resembled eggs with a speck for a pupil, while the hands suggested bunches of gnarled carrots. The figure’s legs were unearthly long.
Though the meaning of this drawing was a mystery, the presence of two heavy-lidded men lolling at a wall impelled the father to hurry the boy on, by means of a hand in the middle of the back.
This drawing did not leave the boy’s thoughts. In church, he fidgeted during the service. That ni
ght, he dreamt of a goblin.
*
He ran down the dimly lit alley, terrified the gnarled fingers would reach out and grab his shoulder. If he looked back, it seemed that the goblin was still attached to the door, a chalk drawing below the waist, living flesh above. Yet by some unexplained means the door could move of its own accord, and gave chase. Sometimes a chalked leg rose out of the wood, becoming solid in the air, and gave the door a bound upwards, and brought the goblin closer to the boy. Twice the hand caught his elbow and pulled him backwards towards some horrible fate – perhaps to be turned into a chalk drawing for ever, to take the goblin’s place upon the door.
But the boy broke free, and was too fast. Then other goblins joined in the chase, thousands of cackling creatures, unattached to doors, but spilling out from St Mary’s, which was lit up within, and then the church organ started, and he was running among the gravestones, and in confusion he headed inside the building by a side entrance, where he saw a goblin playing the organ – its long, uneven fingers stretched over more than an octave of keys and its terrible grin turned in his direction. Then he was running outside once more, down Red Cat Lane towards the river, looking behind every few moments. Still the horde of goblins came in pursuit.
*
He often thought of the goblin on nights when he could not sleep, and he recalled his intense horror as the drawing came alive. New details appeared to him as he relived those moments. He saw the hand emerging from the door, the flexing of the fingers as though stiff after an eternity as a drawing, and then it reached back to pluck the chalk pipe by the stem, which became solid clay, and the contents of its bowl glowed, and it moved towards the flesh of the boy’s face, and he could feel the heat, hot as a poker, close, and closer, to his cheek.
The dream did not deter him from St Mary’s. Of particular fascination was a cavern under the church. Like the other boys of the neighbourhood, he sought the entrance in a hillside close to the river. He carried a candle inside – anxious that it would be extinguished by a stray draught, perhaps of his own breath, and plunge him into darkness, after a glimpse of a grin.
Although hewn from chalk, the walls of the cavern had weathered into a grey-green joylessness. His footsteps echoed. There always seemed to be another turning. If he should fall asleep in the cavern, he imagined the goblins would descend upon him, and they would drag him down into even deeper caverns, perhaps all the way to hell itself.
Even when safe at home, playing on a rug before the fire, he was reminded of goblins, for the creatures were athletic and lithe and shared characteristics with certain toys he possessed. One was a carved acrobatic tumbler with hands in his pockets, who could not lie down but was weighted so that he would see-saw into sitting position. Then there was a cardboard man whose legs were moved by string and a particular tug would send them around his neck. This remarkable power of contortion was shared by the goblins he imagined, who would spin their legs at the groin, and put a right foot, shod with a pointed shoe, over a left shoulder, and then bring a left shoe towards the mouth, to nibble on the shoe’s point. Another toy, a springing spotted-back frog, could even jump just like a goblin, and if the frog landed on the boy’s hand, he shrieked.
*
Although he never forgot the sight of the goblin chalked upon the door, its influence gradually faded as he immersed himself in books.
There were the six volumes of The Arabian Nights. He marvelled at the remarkable assistance that genies could yield to their masters and that, all through the book, Scheherazade used her wonderful stories to prolong the king’s interest and delay her own execution.
Then he was captured by the works of Fielding and, even more so, by those of Smollett. He saw the books’ characters, truly saw them. When he passed an open barn outside the town, he imagined Smollett’s Roderick Random, wounded, staggering inside to lay down among the straw. Then he imagined a countryman thrusting a pitchfork into that straw, the points just missing Roderick’s head. In St Mary’s churchyard, a dried-out branch blown across a grave after a storm became a thigh bone, brandished in a fight among graves in Tom Jones, and he was himself wielding the bone, which shattered into slivers as it landed above an inscription.
*
There was a more enduring suggestion of conflict, on the grandest scale, in the buildings of the area. Several miles of military fortifications, from Gillingham to Brompton, protected Chatham Dockyard from landward attack, and were known as the Chatham Lines. A battery or a drawbridge had been added every time invasion threatened, and to explain its purpose in detail, a small-scale model showing bastions, demibastions and ravelins, and a suitably enthusiastic veteran, would be of some assistance. Among the people of Chatham, however, ‘The Lines’ had come to mean the four hundred square yards of open space next to the garrison, at the top of the hill overlooking the dockyard, where regiments would conduct reviews, manoeuvres and mock battles.
The fortifications at Chatham made a strange and excellent location for the boy to wander. There were vaults, with grates, and if he put his nose in he could smell decayed remains, or damp earth waiting to receive some. There were unexpected turnings, from which at any moment a high-spirited lad could jump on his shoulders and then run off.
In summer, boys played cricket on a nearby field while a youth and his sweetheart might lie in the trench near Fort Pitt, a recess which resembled a gigantic grave, the two conducting their manoeuvres among the grass and stinging nettles, while soldiers armed with muskets peered out from Fort Pitt’s loopholes.
*
It was another afternoon, and a fine one, when the boy and his father took to the countryside around Cobham. They passed quaint cottages and bluebell copses, and strolled down roads white with chalk dust which, by a chance arrangement of grit, could bring to mind a finger of a goblin, if not a hobgoblin, and then they passed hop gardens with their standing poles, then went on through the churchyard to emerge near the Leather Bottle, the old half-timbered inn, where a middle-aged man with a curly white beard stood drinking upon the step. Beyond the bearded man, through the inn’s open door, could be seen leather armchairs as well as prints upon the walls. A pretty young girl with ribbons passed by, and the bearded man gave an appreciative glance.
Onwards the boy and his father proceeded, through the village, beside the porches of old ivy-covered almshouses, and then further on still, past works of much greater antiquity, mysterious standing stones.
There was a fence they peered through, marking the boundary of Cobham Hall, the ancestral home of the Earls of Darnley, and here they spied grazing deer, giants of ash trees, dashing hares among rhododendrons, winding paths and smooth lawns, as well as fine elms and huge-circumference oaks.
‘May we go in?’ the boy asked.
His father laughed. ‘As soon as we receive an invitation from the Earl of Darnley!’
*
Now it was a cold day, and Christmas approached. The boy visited his grandmother in Oxford Street. She was a fine, stately old lady, bespectacled and tending towards severity, and an upholder of the values of neatness and order. The cosiness of the fireside, and her grandson sitting opposite, made stories rise from her memory and she told them to the boy – local tales she had heard when she was a housekeeper in Cheshire: the road haunted by a ghostly dog; the brimstone cave where the Devil was raised; the field where a dragon was slain; the bridge where a hooded monk walked, intoning old-fashioned English; the exact spot where the last jester in England had died, where his bells could still be heard if the wind was right. Then she told of the lives of servants and masters in the house where she worked, and how the estate was tidy, and controlled, and its affairs ran smoothly, thanks to the devoted efforts of herself and those downstairs.
And now it was Christmas! The very word ‘Christmas’ sounded to him like a boot stepping into snow. From the way his father said, ‘I think it may snow again this year,’ the boy gathered that snow was not regular, or even usual, and yet there had been snow at Ch
ristmas for more years of his young life than not – white was the Christmas colour, not green or brown. A Christmas without snow was Christmas in name only.
But regardless of whether there was snow, his father was never half-hearted about the festival. There he was in the kitchen, preparing the punch. He crumbled half a sugarloaf into hot Lisbon wine, stirred, added cloves and cinnamon, and poured the mixture over bitter oranges – he passed a segment of orange to his son before doing so. The orange was so bitter the boy screwed up his face, and his father laughed and rubbed his son’s head. There was tasting to see whether a little more of this or a little more of that should be added. Then the mixture sat in an earthenware pitcher and was left to mull in the coals of the fire. Afterwards they played games, his father bringing out the playing cards, or putting on the blindfold for blindman’s buff. There was no room to dance, but dance they did, his father humming the tunes he remembered from the Christmases of his own boyhood, and mistletoe was brought in, and drawn from behind his back to kiss his wife. There was laughter and they ran to the window – for outside, the snow was brought in, by northern winds, and Christmas was truly here!
*
Then in January, in the warm parlour, the boy sat looking through an album of coloured engravings, and found one showing the King of the Beggars. Other beggars relied on rags and human sympathy, but this beggar was different – his ploy was disguise. There he was as a madman, poor Tom of Bedlam, cutting the air with a handful of straw as though he were a knight; fellows took pity on him, and wondered whether he had sufficient wit to know what a coin was; for he bit a penny as though it were a morsel, and muttered, ‘This bread is hard.’ But if they tried to take it back, it was his. Then he was a poor clergyman; a tin miner in Cornwall; a seaman whose ship had been dashed against rocks; a rat-catcher whose livelihood had been destroyed by an abundance of cats; and even a poor aged grandmother, not begging for herself, you understand, but for her poor grandchildren, whose parents had been burnt alive in a barn, and she was their only hope.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 38