45. Titus Egnatius Tyrannus
Soon after their meeting in the café near Sloane Square, Jane rang the shop to propose that they should try to forget what had been said that afternoon. Alexander promptly agreed, and she said that she would call again before long, as she did, a month later, when they had a conversation that led to other calls, which in turn brought about another meeting, when she came up to London for a weekend course and they went out for a meal in Covent Garden. And when Alexander phoned to thank her for the flowers she had sent his mother, she invited him to stay with herself and Philip in Brighton, an invitation she repeated each time they spoke, and which Alexander finally accepted not long after the October storm, as he would recall, because he would remember the team of tractors pulling trees across a field that was strewn with branches, somewhere near Hayward’s Heath.
She opened the door and said nothing for a few seconds, as if to denote by this pause, and by the way she stood aside to allow him into the house, that a new episode of their lives was now commencing. Flooring of polished pale wood extended into every downstairs room, through doorways in which there were no doors. Jane took him into the kitchen, where a bottle of wine and three tall glasses were laid out in a triangle on a bare steel surface that was the size of a single bed. Music was playing in the front room, a piece of piano music he had heard once or twice but could not name. Philip was finishing off some work upstairs, Jane told him, and she took the bottle and glasses through, and set them on a dining table that was a rectangle of thick oak, supported by six square legs as broad as a hand-span. She lowered the volume of the music, turning one of the pair of dials on the amplifier’s bald steel fascia, and sat down at one end of the enormous white settee. Alexander sat at the other end, facing the steel-framed fireplace, in which was placed a tall square vase that held a bouquet of stripped pale twigs on a bed of grey pebbles. Above the fireplace hung a monochrome photograph of a single plump tulip. ‘Luscious, isn’t it?’ said Jane, rubbing a wetted finger on the cuff of her raw linen shirt as she admired the tulip. Alexander stood up to examine the flower in the picture, which glistened like an olive dipped in oil. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, smiling at the whole room, and Alexander looked around, recalling the cushions and trinkets and perfumed fabrics of her flat. It was very nice, very luxurious, very tasteful, he told her, and Philip, who had soundlessly descended the stairs, thanked him for his kind comments.
‘Please excuse the lack of civility,’ said Philip, offering his hand and looking at Alexander as if he had heard his guest described as an invalid and was mildly puzzled to find him robust. Perhaps a year or two younger than Jane, he had frayed-looking sandy hair that appeared to be carefully unkempt, and the gait and posture of a man who had once been a proficient sportsman and was still quite fit, though his shirt was tight above the waist and his eyes were slightly bloodshot. ‘You have no drink in your hand. Why is this?’ he asked Jane, who explained that she was letting the wine breathe, a notion he dismissed as nonsense, and he kissed her on the forehead on his way to the table. Passing a glass to Alexander, he asked him about his journey. Philip turned the stem of his glass between his fingers while he listened, apparently still thinking of his work. ‘I’d better get the meal under way,’ he said, as soon as there was a pause, and he went off to the kitchen, taking a drink with him.
Over dinner the talk was mostly of Jane’s clinic and then of the language school where Philip worked, until he mentioned a Belgian boy who, he had discovered that week, had been earning good money as a DJ in Ostend since he was fifteen, and Jane told him that Alexander had been the singer in a group that her brother had seen. ‘What year was that?’ Philip asked. ‘I might have come across you,’ he said, after Alexander had worked out when The Park Rangers had formed and when they had disbanded. ‘I was at King’s then. Used to go to gigs all the time.’
‘It’s not very likely you saw us,’ said Alexander. ‘We were as obscure as they come.’
‘You don’t know. I saw some fantastically obscure acts. Some of them so obscure they hadn’t even heard of themselves. I could easily have seen you,’ he said, as if he believed Alexander would be flattered if it turned out that he had seen him sing.
‘Honestly, there’s not a chance. We never played north of the river. The quest for fame failed at the Blackwall Tunnel.’
‘The Park Rangers,’ Philip murmured. ‘I’m sure I saw an outfit called The Park Rangers,’ he persisted emptily.
‘We were really bad.’
‘No, you weren’t,’ said Jane.
‘Every band was really bad in the places I went to,’ said Philip.
‘If you saw us you wouldn’t have forgotten.’
‘Depends how much drink was taken on board,’ Philip retorted, pouring some wine for Alexander. ‘There’s one night at the back of my mind. I’ve got a vague idea, but –’ he fretted, scratching his scalp. He filled his own glass, squinting at the bottle as if to bring a memory into focus. ‘Did you ever play around Blackfriars Bridge? The south side of Blackfriars Bridge?’ he asked.
‘Not as I recall.’
‘I definitely saw a band with a name like that, somewhere near there. Where the hell was it?’ he asked himself, with an impatience that seemed rhetorical. ‘Somewhere in that area, I’m sure. Near the bridge. We went to see a couple of groups. The night before a spoken exam, it was. I couldn’t hear a bloody thing the next day. Failed miserably. We came out of the pub, but straight away I had to stop for a leak.’
‘Philip,’ Jane interjected. ‘We don’t need the intimate details. I think we’ve established that you didn’t see Alexander’s group.’
‘Perhaps, but let me work this one out. It’ll come to me,’ Philip assured her, directing at Alexander a gaze that seemed to stop at the surface of Alexander’s eyes. ‘I stopped around the corner from the pub. I remember peeing through some railings, and there was a patch of grass that stank of cats, and an old window, a stone window, in a brick wall. High up.’ He raised a hand, as if reaching for a mirage of the window.
‘A round window?’
‘I think so.’
‘I think it was as well. I think you were by London Bridge, not Blackfriars, and you answered the call of nature in Clink Street.’
‘You do?’ replied Philip. ‘How so, inspector?’
‘There’s only one stone window in a brick wall anywhere in that neighbourhood, as far as I know,’ said Alexander. ‘The window you saw is what’s left of the palace of the Bishops of Winchester. It used to stretch for hundreds of feet along the riverbank. Henry VIII met Catherine Howard in the park of the palace, it’s said. Eventually it was demolished and the site became tenements and warehouses. When one of the warehouses burned down, the window came out into the open.’
Philip briefly sustained an operatic expression of admiring astonishment. ‘Years I lived in London, and I never knew that. How do you know about that?’
‘There’s a sign by the wall,’ said Alexander, but then Jane intervened to tell Philip about Alexander’s walks.
Having opened another bottle of wine, Philip gave Jane a conspiratorial grin and left the room to fetch a book from upstairs. Putting his feet on the table, he declaimed: ‘St Edmund the King. What’s its date then? What’s it look like?’ Once Alexander had described that church in sufficient detail he shouted the name of another, as Mr Barrington used to throw out the names of battles and treaties and famous men. Flicking backwards and forwards through the book, Philip demanded an account of St Mary-le-Bow, St Lawrence Jewry, St Stephen Walbrook, St Mary Abchurch and many more, and Alexander duly described each façade and interior as he saw it in his mind, matching perfectly the picture on the page every time. When at last he tired of the game, Philip smiled with a bewilderment that now seemed genuine. He flopped a hand towards Jane. ‘You know what I’m thinking?’ he said.
And so, after much persuasion from Jane, it came about that Alexander and Philip and a dozen of Philip’s students convene
d on the steps of St Paul’s, on a Saturday morning in late March.
From the cathedral he took them down Ludgate Hill, along Fleet Street and into its tributary lanes. They continued along the Strand, and followed a circuit of Trafalgar Square. After a diversion through Admiralty Arch, Alexander led the group down Whitehall. At the Cenotaph one of the French boys snapped a bubble of chewing gum when Alexander pointed out the monument. ‘Do you understand what this means?’ Alexander demanded, but the boy chewed open-mouthed, looking up at the sky. ‘It isn’t just a lump of stone. It means something important,’ Alexander insisted, and he made them see a column of the Cenotaph’s dead and missing soldiers, marching in single file down the avenue of Whitehall, a column that would take two weeks to pass. ‘Two whole weeks, marching all day and all night. And for the French people, and for the Russians, and for the people of Austria and Hungary, it was worse.’ He told them about the silence that used to spread across the country at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Using his father’s words, he described a street at the stroke of eleven, and the silence that flowed into it as everyone stopped where they were standing and all traffic came to a halt, and for two minutes the city was as quiet as the sea.
‘And now it’s time to forget,’ said the boy, but a girl with an ultramarine streak in her hair and a red tartan skirt called the boy an imbecile, and after the tour, when they were having a drink in a pub by St James’s Park, she sat beside Alexander immediately and asked him so many questions about the places they had seen that he was still talking to her when Philip announced that it was time to get back to Brighton.
The following month Philip brought a second group up to London, and Monique came along again, to hear about the Inns of Court and Covent Garden and Soho, and it was Monique’s enthusiasm, rather than her classmate’s indifference, that Alexander talked about when he came to tell Sam and Liz what he had been doing.
‘A good way to meet women,’ Sam remarked, reverting to a theme he introduced every time Alexander visited them.
‘She’s a girl, Sam. A French girl. Now at home, with her French boyfriend, I should imagine.’
‘Yes, but it’s a good way to meet women, that line of work. With you in a position of authority and all. Women like that. Good looks and authority. Winning combination.’
‘And you enjoyed it,’ said Liz.
‘Certainly.’
‘A fact entirely unconnected to the attractiveness of Monique?’ Sam enquired.
‘Almost entirely.’
‘I think it sounds interesting,’ said Liz. ‘I wish I’d come along. Learn a lot, I’m sure.’
‘Could be a good sideline,’ said Sam. ‘Lot of demand, I’d say. Put an ad in the mags, I bet you’d get some takers.’
‘You would,’ said Liz. ‘Get you out of that damned shop as well.’
He would take another of Philip’s classes if he were asked, Alexander had decided, but Sam, without telling him, rang some of the hoteliers he knew through work and dictated a notice to them, which they brought to the attention of their guests. Then one evening he phoned Alexander to tell him that he knew of this family from Carlisle who were staying at a bed and breakfast in Gower Street with a couple of friends, and would pay a few quid for a personal tour, because they only had half a day to see it and didn’t want to faff around with guidebooks because guidebooks were all the same and you spent all your time staring at the page instead of looking. ‘I told them you knew your stuff, Mac,’ Sam wheedled. ‘They’ll be disappointed if you’re not available. Give it a go. You’ll be great. You owe it to London.’
The first of the tour groups that Alexander would lead, sporadically, over the course of the next three years or more, gathered on a Saturday afternoon in July, in Paternoster Square. He welcomed Mr Sidaway and his wife Anne, and their daughter Julie, and their companions the Middletons, and preceded them into St Paul’s. From the dome’s upper gallery he identified the prominent buildings and traced the route they would be taking. In Watling Street he showed them where the Tower Royal had once stood, and introduced the subject of the Great Fire, in which the tower had been destroyed. In Queen Victoria Street, by the paltry remnants of the temple of Mithras, he evoked the dank green-walled room beneath the church of San Clemente in Rome, a city he had never seen, and described the carving of the slaughtered bull on its altar, flexing his arm to hold the animal’s jaw as Mithras held it. They passed St Stephen Walbrook on their way to the Mansion House, where he conjured the avenue and canal that would have connected it to a piazza around St Paul’s, had the city been rebuilt after the war as one team of architects had planned it. He summarised the history of the Mansion House and the Grocers’ Hall and the Bank of England, where, he would remember telling them, plundered Spanish coins were put into circulation with the head of George III superimposed on the neck of the Spanish king.
‘And that over there?’ asked Mrs Sidaway.
‘That’s St Mary Woolnoth, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor after the Great Fire. The first church to be built there was raised by the Saxons, on top of a Roman temple dedicated to Concord; Bank station was hollowed out below it, in the last three years of the nineteenth century. The interior is especially beautiful, but you will probably have to take my word for that, because I’ve never known it to be open on a Saturday. T. S. Eliot in one of his poems refers to the dead sound the clock makes when it strikes nine, but I’m taking his word for that, because I’ve never heard it.’
He looked towards the steps of Bank station, and he saw a flash that was the flash of Megan’s hair, but the shock of it passed away in an instant, and what remained was a memory of contentment, a memory that was wholly pleasing. ‘Over there is Princes Street,’ he went on, ‘where a strange object known as the London Curse was found in 1929. It’s a piece of lead, inscribed in Latin: “Titus Egnatius Tyrannus is cursed”.’ Then he added, as if as an afterthought, ‘“and Publius Cicereius Felix is cursed”’, and Julie laughed.
46. Roderick
Whenever they stopped, the fat man bustled to the front of the group, as if he had heard rumour of an accident and wanted to be sure of a good view of it. He wore a tight grey duffle coat and a grey woollen hat with a pompom on the top, and around his neck was wound, three times, a vermilion hand-knitted scarf. A newspaper protruded from one pocket of his coat and a notebook from the other, and in his right hand he carried a thick walking stick, with which he would occasionally knock the bandaging that bulged above the shoe of his right foot. He blinked twitchily while he listened, as though his eyes were being stung by smoke. It was at St Clement Danes that he began to take issue with his guide.
‘Nobody is altogether sure,’ said Alexander, ‘how this church came by its name.’ The noise of a pantechnicon obliged him to pause. The fat man grimaced with irritation, and his neck extended like a tortoise’s from the coils of the scarf. ‘It is said, however, that a Danish king by the name of Harold Harefoot was buried here, along with several of his compatriots. The original church appeared to survive the Great Fire, but not long after it was declared to be unsafe, and so was demolished. This replacement was mostly the work of Christopher Wren.’
‘You’ll find,’ the fat man interrupted, ‘that there’s another explanation for the name.’ Wincing, he gave his bandage a sharp tap. ‘There used to be a church here for Danes with English wives. That was after Alfred had chased the Danes out. If you’d married an Englishwoman you could stay.’
‘Is that so?’ asked Alexander. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘I believe it is so. I’m not saying that your version isn’t right. But there is another story.’
‘I’m grateful to you, Mr –?’
‘Roderick. Roderick Walton. Please, go on,’ said the fat man, drawing a curlicue in the air with his stick.
‘The steeple,’ Alexander continued, stepping back to regard it, ‘was raised in 1719, to a design by James Gibbs, who is best known as the architect of St-Martin-in-the-Fields,
which we will be seeing shortly, after we’ve visited another Gibbs building.’
‘St Mary,’ said Roderick.
‘Exactly. St Mary-le-Strand,’ Alexander affirmed.
‘St Mary what?’ asked someone else.
‘Le-Strand.’
‘What’s that about?’ demanded a third member of the party. ‘What’s with the “le”?’
‘You get English names like that. It’s not all that uncommon. From the time of the Normans.’
‘For instance?’
‘Ashby-de-la-Zouche. Poulton-le-Fylde,’ Alexander added. ‘Anyway, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To return to St Clement, the church as you see it today is a reconstruction, because Wren’s building was gutted by fire in the Blitz. It reopened in 1958 and was dedicated to the RAF and Allied air forces, who funded the restoration of the church. As we’ll be seeing, the badges of some 750 squadrons and units are set into the floor.’
‘Is anyone famous buried here, Mr MacIndoe?’ enquired an American woman in a pristine belted trenchcoat.
‘It’s a rare characteristic of St Clement that there are no individual tombs inside the church.’
Roderick took one step forward and bounced his walking stick on its rubber ferrule, like a variety artiste finishing his act with a bit of panache. ‘I think you’ll find that Thomas Otway, the formerly famous playwright, was buried here.’
‘What did he write?’ asked the American woman.
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