Anticipation (11 page)

O
n Christmas Day 1805, secure on the second floor of 30 Fournier Street, my great-great-great-great-aunt Babs is delighted to receive an orange. She turns it round and round, so bright on this dull December morning, feels the bumps of its skin between her hands.

On Boxing Day, she takes her orange out visiting. She plans to show it to her Aunt Marguerite at Mr Warburton’s house in Hoxton. But Marguerite, shivering in her fireless room, has an odd look about the eyes today, and Babs keeps the present in her pocket.

On their way out, the Hardings call on Dr Schöneberg in his office.

‘
Fröhliche Weihnachten!
’ he cries, removing his calipers from the shaven skull of an elderly inmate. ‘Merry Christmas! Come in, come in!’

‘What are you doing to that man?’

‘Hush, Babs,’ hisses her mother.

‘It is Dr Gall’s new science from Germany. The skull’ — Schöneberg places both hands on the old man’s head — ‘grows around the brain, yes? So we can feel, from the shapes of the cranial bone — yes? — in which parts of the brain there is the abnormality. Where is the madness.’

Babs stares at Schöneberg’s fingers.

‘Here, for example, I palpate a malformed ninth faculty. This, this,
bump
— yes? — covers an excessively large acquisitive organ, causing Robson here to pick up that which does not belong to him and, while his other faculties do not attend, to place it in his pocket.’

Babs can almost feel it herself, the knobbly, stubbly, tattle-tale skull, the old man’s skin beneath her hands. Almost, but not quite.

‘Kneel down,’ she says to the friendless boy digging over the kitchen garden at 30 Fournier Street. ‘I want to feel your head.’

‘You what, miss?’

‘Do it, or there’ll be trouble.’

Obediently, he lowers himself to the path.

‘All I can feel is your hair,’ Babs complains. It’s thick and smooth as grease under her fingers. ‘We’ll have to shave it off.’

The boy’s head jerks up in alarm. ‘No, miss!’

Babs studies the shape of his forehead.

‘I’ll give you an orange,’ she says.

Twenty-seven years later, at Marguerite’s post-mortem, Babs has a much better grasp of what she’s looking at. A copy of Dr Gall’s great work rests on her desk at home, next to a specially commissioned china bust on which the faculties of the mind are demarcated.

She no longer borrows her brother’s clothes to attend anatomy lectures (George having put on a pound or two by now, and moved to Cloudesley Square), but has had a suit of her own made up by a discreet young Jew in Fashion Street. Over the years, she has observed — albeit from the back row, where the light is dimmest — a number of organs of the mind, both in toto and in section.

On this occasion, however, Babs doesn’t need her disguise. Dr Chadstow would have consented to dissect Marguerite in front of the entire readership of the
Lady
, if required, so eager was he to receive the gift of a fresh body, untainted by the cholera pit, free of tar and lime.

Her aunt’s brain, it surprises no one present to learn, is somewhat on the light side — it weighs in at just forty-five ounces. The cerebellum and spinal cord are atrophied, explaining the worsening bouts of palsy that had so inconvenienced Marguerite’s keepers. Otherwise, the organ reveals no secrets not long ago betrayed to Dr Schöneberg’s hands. A pronounced area
of Destructiveness; under-developed Benevolence, Causality and Caution.

On her way home, Babs calls at Cloudesley Square. Her
sister-in
-law, Maria, rings the bell for tea; little Harry, eager to show off his latest specimen, drags his aunt up to the nursery before the servant has chance to comply.

‘A large blue.’ Babs turns the jar, admires the iridescent wings that blink open and shut. ‘You should kill it quickly, Harry, before it damages itself. You don’t want it to get broken.’

Harry shifts from foot to foot, and shakes his head. ‘I’m timing it,’ he explains, ‘with Mr Fortescue’s watch. We’ve worked out the volume of oxygen in the jar. When we divide that by the time it takes to die, we’ll know how much air a butterfly breathes a minute.’

‘Clever boy.’

‘Feel my head again.’

‘You have the brain of a scientist,’ Babs reassures him, pushing her fingers through his strawberry curls. ‘You will grow up to discover brilliant things. And …’ — she taps him affectionately under the chin — ‘you’re going to make someone a fine husband.’

He blushes. ‘It’s certain, now?’

‘Oh yes. The cranial bone has taken its final form. The foundations of character don’t change.’ She smiles. ‘That’s the beauty of science, Harry. We deal in certainties.’

Back at Fournier Street, Babs closes the front door on a pungent August evening. She takes her anti-cholera galoshes off and makes her way as quietly as she can up the stairs and past her father’s door. Behind it, there is a moan and a crash, and an unmistakeable odour wafts out onto the landing. Babs shudders and hurries on.

‘Keep still, sir,’ urges Mrs Peters’ voice, inside. ‘Don’t mess about in it, now. Lord love you, sir, you’re getting it everywhere.’

In her own room, Babs turns the key in the lock, undresses without aid and begins to prepare for her evening engagement. She unpins her long red plait and puts it away in the drawer. (It’s
all her own — the requirements of science aside, Babs is very fond of her hair.) She brushes out her bangs, oils back her remaining curls and ties them low on her neck with a black band.

Next, she works her wiry calves into gentlemen’s drawers. Uncorseted, her square-cut body is not so very unlike a man’s. Gloves hide her hands. False whiskers mask the line of her jaw. Her waistcoat is padded below the breast, her coat and trousers loosely cut, and once she reaches the street, her cloak will cover all.

In a little under an hour, her toilette is complete, and at five to eight, the gentleman known to the district as Mr Jones leaves 30 Fournier Street by means of its well-grown fig tree.

Babs doesn’t have far to go — just down the street to the Weaver’s Arms — but even so, she is propositioned twice before she gets there.

‘Not tonight,’ she tells evil-smelling old Annie Fynch.

The child in the market doorway is new; she lifts his chin to the street lamp, and after a second’s examination, offers him a shilling if he will call on Miss Harding at Fournier Street tomorrow, after the seventh bell.

Wrexsie is waiting for her — or rather, for Jones — at the bar. He has a film of sweat on his upper lip and a glassy look to his eyes. Babs sighs. As a drunk, the man is more tiresome than most. She buys him another pint, and herself an unwatered glass of disinfecting brandy.

‘Have you brought him?’

‘I’ve
asked
him,’ says Wrexsie, ‘if that’s what you mean. I never said as I was going to
bring
him nowhere.’ He draws his lip up over an ill-set tangle of teeth, like a ferret scenting blood, and stretching his neck, surveys the bar.

Babs looks him up and down as only the sober can. ‘I hope you’re not wasting my time.’

‘He said he’d be here. Keep your lid on, mate. Cross Tony’s a man of his word.’

She scans the happy crowd of drinkers. There’s many a skull my great-aunt knows in the Weaver’s Arms tonight, though few
indeed belong to members of the once respectable trade for which the inn was named.

‘Evening, Wrexsie, Mr Jones. Out for some fun tonight, then?’

‘Rigby.’ Babs nods to a dealer in second-hand lace with the flattest brain pan she has ever measured.

‘All right, Riggers?’ Wrexsie enquires jovially.

‘Better off for another pint, mate. Know what I mean?’

‘You see that undertaker I told you about over at Bow?’

‘Buy a girl a glass of gin, sir?’ interrupts a voice at Babs’ left shoulder.

‘Not now, love,’ says another. ‘We got business.’

Babs turns. Not two feet from her face is a bull-necked man with a recently broken nose, one black scab marking the new location of its bridge, and another beside it on his cheekbone. A knife scar running from brow to ear pleats the corner of his right eye, which, unlike the left, is grey as the Thames.

‘Jones. I got that right, ain’t I? You wanted to meet me.’

Babs shifts her weight to her back foot. Meeting the gaze of those mismatched eyes, she feels a little dizzy, as if forced to focus, at this close range, on the faces of two different men.

(Much later, when she is shaving his skull, her razor scraping delicately over the ridge of bone that divides its hemispheres, this sense of duality will return to her. Then, the schism is not so much in her subject’s head as in the room itself — as if two Fournier Streets and their occupants exist, each quite independent of the other.)

‘Cross Tony,’ she says to him now, at the bar of the Weaver’s Arms.

He looks at her very seriously. ‘They don’t call me that,’ he says. ‘Not twice. My name is Anthony Boucher.’

The next morning, even as she palpates the skull of a pickpocket’s stall in Newgate Prison, Anthony Boucher is still on Babs’ mind. He is everything Wrexsie promised her. A distillation of the residuum, bred blood and bone of the criminal classes. Three generations
before him swinging from Tyburn Tree. His father and two uncles continuing the family tradition here at Newgate, and intercession on behalf of his unborn self the only thing to save his mother’s neck. A pure-blooded prince of the kleptocracy. A man born into a prison cell.

His fabled left hand — the same that rested, briefly, upon her sleeve — has shattered jaws and broken heads for profit and diversion. He is a robber, of course. A scampsman, a padder, a low toby man. He has a way of punching a gentleman in the back that renders his prey immobile for half an hour. Some say he killed a man, once. Others make the tally higher.

He is her perfect specimen. Free and whole, untouched — as yet — by the spoiling hands of the law.

Thinking of the men he has robbed, or worse, Babs feels an odd little flutter, like the draught of a pigeon’s wing on the nape of her neck (a quiver her Aunt Marguerite might recognise, but she herself does not). She imagines his victims felled to the street, grown men made helpless as little friendless boys, all their power stolen away. Their last sight in this world, perhaps, Anthony Boucher’s eyes.

I
have to admire Babs’ drive. These days, I’m finding it hard to get off the sofa myself. Sometimes the only thing that drags me upstairs at night is the thought of Jake catching me here in the morning, haggard and unmade-up in yesterday’s clothes. That, and the bloody dog, who can’t always be ignored.

But I look across a hundred and eighty years, and there she is, my great-great-great-great-aunt, writing up her busy amateur observations with trainspotting zeal. She doesn’t need money, can’t expect fame. What is she hoping will come of all this? I’m buggered if I know.

It’s easy enough for me. When I’ve had enough of myself, watched the sunset until it’s just a blue stain on the dark, I can turn on the TV. If I had to find some other way of slipping my itchy skin, who knows what I might choose?

Babs can’t pop down the off-licence for a packet of fags and a frozen cheesecake. She can’t turn on a sitcom. And yet I can’t imagine her sitting up alone all night, drinking Joshua’s cellar dry and dwelling on her mad aunt.

Or on how it feels to be her father, speechless, ataxic and incontinent in the next room. How it felt to be Marguerite. And who will hire the nurse for her when her turn comes. No. I suspect she fills her empty hours with the concrete and constructive. My Aunt Babs has the measure of her own mind, as well as everyone else’s — I admire that about her, too.

There was a time, I think, when I was the same. At the centre of my own head, clipboard in hand, directing the heavy machinery in a hi-viz vest and a hard hat. But I’m losing it now. All that control. I can’t always make my brain do as it should.

A first symptom, perhaps, of dying anterior horn cells. Spasticity of thought. The siren before the gates begin to shut on the spinal tunnel from muscle to mind.

Ella looks up at me from her blanket and sighs.

Have another chardonnay, Janine.

I think, as I brush my teeth, that perhaps I’ve been too hard on Maggie.

And much later, listening to an owl hunt and a 747 climb through the night, the distant wail of an ambulance as it makes its way onto the causeway, that I can’t stand the wait any more. This ever-narrowing ledge between past and future. I want to make something happen. Bring it on.

Perhaps, on one of those hot nineteenth-century August nights, Babs felt it too.

‘Ah,’ says Anthony Boucher in the study of 30 Fournier Street, when the butler has closed the door. ‘I see now. That explains it.’

Babs, of course, ignores this. ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Boucher,’ she says briskly. She indicates the low chair between them, in the centre of the room. ‘Please, won’t you sit down?’

After a moment’s consideration, Boucher crosses the Turkey carpet to stand in front of the fire, from which position he studies Babs languidly, his battered head to one side.

‘I thought you were just a molly-boy, the other night. Wrexsie didn’t tell me.’

‘If you think we’ve met before, Mr Boucher, you’re mistaken, I assure you.’

‘Is that right, love?’

Babs blushes. ‘Perhaps you mistake me for my cousin, Mr Jones. I’m told there’s a strong resemblance.’

‘Oh, I don’t make mistakes, sweetheart.’ Turning away, he begins to work his way along the bookcase towards her desk, one thick finger running across each spine. ‘You got a taste for strange flesh, is that it? Or maybe’ — he looks over his shoulder and into
her eyes — ‘you just like the feel of a man’s trousers.’

Babs drops her gaze to the floor. In all her investigations, this has never happened before. She thinks of calling the butler back. But there is only so far she trusts the man, and no telling what Porsham might overhear this too-sharp robber say.

‘And now,’ Boucher continues, arriving alongside her, ‘you want to feel my head.’ He leans in. ‘You think you can handle it, do you, love? I should warn you,’ he whispers, ‘it’s hard.’

‘Don’t you want to know your future?’ asks Babs sternly, pulling herself together at last.

‘My future?’ says Anthony Boucher. ‘What kind of a fool would want to know that?’

‘Then why did you accept my invitation?’

She listens to his footsteps cross the floor behind her. He’s surprisingly light on his feet for such a solid man.

‘Curiosity, maybe.’ He pauses on the other side of her desk, resting his left hand on the head of the white china bust. ‘Let’s call it that. And your man said you’d give me a sovereign.’

‘A half sovereign. And only if you’ll shave your head.’

‘A sov,’ says Boucher softly. ‘And I’ve never been a razor man. Why don’t you do it for me, sweetheart? All nice and neat, now.’

This is not the first time my great-aunt has held a man’s head in her hands. She can handle a blade in a way that would make her great-grandfather Tobias the fellmonger proud. The tingling detachment she feels as she watches Boucher’s naked scalp emerge does not unsteady her strokes. As the room begins to replicate, reality to split, Babs, like the expert she is, places the craniometer around his skull, notes down its breadth, begins her fingertip palpation.

And even as Boucher’s hands reach up to take her wrists, there is a part of her mind that still sees this as science. A
ground-breaking
experiment. The power of the criminal animal observed first-hand, at courageously intimate quarters.

The animal’s power, Babs discovers rapidly, is very great indeed. It speaks to her in a language she was unaware she knew. It explains things, shows her, right there on the Turkey carpet, what she’s been seeking for, oh, so very long.

In that other Fournier Street — the one that hangs, crystalline and discrete, beside this, the one to which she will return when this is over — another Babs continues to take notes.

Here, eyes open, the
Fabrica
of Vesalius digging into her spine, she recognises Anthony Boucher. He’s been inside her all along. She knows him, the way you know the shape of a long-lost friend, the way you can pick the back of an old lover’s head out of a crowd. And there is no other course — none at all — that their meeting could have taken.

‘What’s your name?’ he growls into her ear.

‘Barbara,’ she tells him, when she finds breath.

‘Babs, eh?’ he says. ‘You’re a naughty girl. I like it.’

Anthony Boucher walks towards Whitechapel in the dark. He feels himself almost a gentleman tonight, a notch above the
cabbage-choked
gutters and piss-stinking alleys his feet pass, rough edges smoothed away between my great-aunt’s thighs. He doesn’t stop in at the Weaver’s Arms, or any other ale house. He wants to take this feeling home to his bed, to sleep in the scent of it while it’s fresh, to wake up with it in the morning.

Cross Tony has nothing to fear in these streets he knows as well as his own strength. No one, male or female, invites him to accompany them to a darker yard, or offers to be his guide. His fellow parishioners do not petition him for tobacco or the time. From Fournier Street to his home in Black Lion Yard he is unapproached, the busy rookery, for him, a place of silent contemplation.

He arrives to find the shutters of the oyster shop already fastened. Letting himself in, he wonders what Miss Babs Harding is doing now. He imagines her in her bed, a vast white island like those he saw when he worked the chimneys as a child. He feels in his pockets for a match, and strikes it. She will be thinking, surely, of him.

The blow to the forehead catches him completely by surprise. Of all people, he should know better, but still he throws back his head. As he does so, something hard is pressed against his throat.
For the second time tonight, he feels arms around him, squeezing him tight, holding on as if to life itself. The room, a blare of lights and voices now, begins to slip away.

Waking, Anthony Boucher lies still as a stunned rabbit, eyes squeezed shut, taking silent inventory of his limbs. His wrists are tied together. There is more rope around each ankle, and yet another loop around his tender neck. He recognises the filthy floor of the oyster shop beneath his cheek.

‘Watch it,’ a voice warns. ‘He’s starting to come round.’

Lights move closer, orange through his eyelids.

‘That him?’

He feels breath on his face, catches the scent of gin and eels.

‘It’s him all right.’

Anthony Boucher opens his eyes.

‘The devil — !’

He sees, recoiling from him with urgency but little
co-ordination
, a mightily whiskered gent of middle years. A stranger to him — and by the cut of the man’s coat, to London, too. In the background are two Peelers.

‘You never seen me before in your life,’ says Boucher, hoarsely.

‘Quiet, you,’ says a voice behind, and the toe of a boot nudges his kidneys.

‘I most certainly have,’ the whiskered gent says. ‘You stole a sovereign from me not two hours ago, you rascal.’

‘Check his pockets,’ one of the Peelers says.

Rough hands comply. ‘Well, would you look at that?’ their owner says, in a heavy tone of wonder. ‘Who’d have thought? A sovereign!’

‘That’s mine.’

‘Yours, Boucher? And how would you have come by it, pray?’

‘I was paid it.’

‘Hark at that!’ The Peeler laughs. ‘Cross Tony earned his sov! Well, there’s a first time for everything, they say. What did you do, mate, take in washing?’

‘I did an experiment. Let a lady examine my head. You know, for science.’

‘You want your head examining all right.’

‘I was there all night. You go and ask her.’

A hand slips under his arm, and his rope collar tightens. ‘C’mon, Boucher, up you get. You’ll be doing your bit for science soon enough, mate.’

Over breakfast in the dining room, Babs makes a sketch, from memory, of Anthony Boucher’s head. The morning is warm and still, the sun filtering in through the fig leaves to pattern the cloth; beyond the open sash, a squirrel pauses in its testing of the fruit to cast an eye over the Spode.

Boucher’s skull is a conundrum. It is concave where it ought to be convex, large where it should be small. His moral faculties are normal. He has the forehead of a philosopher, and the occipital bone of a hermit. Should a child with such a skull be brought to her for career advice, Babs might suggest he become a monk. The protuberance above his nose suggests a greed for knowledge; those along his superciliary arches denote extraordinary perception.

These cannot be the bones that Anthony Boucher was born with. Violence, she is sure, has deformed their proper shape. But what, then, of the faculties beneath? Might they, too, have changed, expanded and contracted with their shell? Can a man be beaten into a better mind, as a convict is flogged to contrition?

Science, in the form of Dr Gall, says no, and the evidence of Boucher’s life does not contradict it.

There is other evidence, of course. Evidence of recent and empirical nature. My great-aunt might remember, if she chose, those things she saw in him last night. But the schism in 30 Fournier Street has closed, Babs’ worlds snicked back together neat as the halves of a Swiss watch, leaving no room between them — none at all — for that other Anthony Boucher.

Not that she is without feelings for him. Babs looks over the portrait she has made with not only scientific curiosity, but a
certain proprietary revulsion. She has not the slightest intention of ever seeing him again.

She is unprepared, therefore, for the visit she receives from a Mr Abraham just before noon.

‘I believe you are acquainted,’ he accuses her in the front parlour, ‘with Anthony Boucher.’

Babs considers the extravagant bumps above Mr Abraham’s left ear, which his prematurely receding hairline does nothing to disguise. They betray a man accustomed to the art of insinuation, to swirling his thin fingers in others’ private affairs. She doesn’t invite him to sit down.

‘I think I must disappoint you, sir. I’m not familiar with that name.’

‘Perhaps you know him by another — Cross Tony, he’s sometimes called.’

Babs thinks. ‘Yes,’ she feels it wiser to admit, ‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘Heard of him?’ Abraham arches his brows like a veteran of the stage. ‘Was he not your guest in this house last night?’