Kept (20 page)

A Londoner for half his forty years, he swiftly identified the various landmarks that lay before him. Far away, rising from the lower masses of buildings, there stood in black majesty the dome of St. Paul’s. Scraps of murky vapour, softening its outlines as they flew around it, gave it the appearance of something less than solid, floating almost on a sea of penumbral brick. Nearer, amongst a myriad of spires and steeples, lay the bulk of Newgate, its countless little windows glittering out of the shadow. Nearer still Smithfield, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, the glimmer of the railway line, like an enormous artery, which spreads between Clerkenwell Road and Charterhouse Street.

The enormity of the scene, and his own insignificance in the face of it, impressed him, and he began rapidly to descend the slope, reaching decisions of which he had not formerly thought himself capable as he went. He would find some form of words that would satisfy his wife without telling her the exact truth. As for himself, he would shut his mind to all extraneous thoughts and fix his concentration on the task in hand.

Reaching the foot of the hill once more, he plunged southeastwards into more familiar territory. Dusk had fallen now, and the pavements—garishly illumined by the flaring gas lamps—were crowded with costers’ barrows and roadside shops. Here he wandered for a while, his hand tightly clutched once more in the pocket of his top-coat, in search of some inexpensive delicacy that might be a comfort to his wife. A handful of shrimps and a tin of salmon having completed his purchases, he moved off in the direction of the Farringdon Road. The house in Clerkenwell Court was quite dark. Entering his room he found it unlit, the fire extinguished in the grate; only the sound of his wife’s breathing denoted that any living thing inhabited it. Presently, although he had been silent in his movements, merely squatting by the hearth and with infinite patience attempting to rebuild the fire, his wife stirred.

“Is that you, John?”

“Yes, but don’t trouble yourself. Look, here is the fire nearly alight. And there shall be supper presently.”

“I declare I do feel that bad. As if my head would tumble off my shoulders. Supper, you say?”

The lamp lit and the flames taking hold in the grate, he displayed his purchases to her.

“But I thought the gentleman had come after a debt?”

“Well…yes. In a manner of speaking. But there is money, too. And work, of a kind. Let me explain it to you.”

“Well, John!”

The fire rose in the hearth. With an effort, his wife hoisted herself from the bed and began to decant the shrimps into a saucer. Let it be hoped that, between them, the Dewars did not spend an altogether comfortless evening.

Somewhat to his surprise—for there was a part of him that still believed his dealings with Mr. Pardew’s clerk to have been entirely chimerical—Dewar discovered that the events of the succeeding days fell out largely as Grace had predicted. On the next morning he proceeded to an establishment in the Clerkenwell Road, with whose proprietor he had in recent weeks become exceedingly intimate, and for the sum of thirteen shillings and sixpence took his suit of clothes out of pawn. It was a good suit, purchased shortly before the end of his grocering days, and examining it as it lay on the brass bedstead in Clerkenwell Court—where it seemed to flaunt its superiority to every other garment in the room in a very vulgar and indiscreet way—Dewar thought that it would do. He was not sanguine enough, however, to imagine that this would be the limit of his expenditure. His boots, as he knew from his excursion to Primrose Hill on the previous afternoon, were falling into pieces, and his tall hat, run to earth in a cupboard that contained the fragments of a defunct mangle, proved to be rent nearly in two. Accordingly, taking one of the four sovereigns that remained, he went out again to an emporium in Rosamon Street and laid out a further ten shillings on a pair of shoes. A hat, seen in the window of a secondhand shop, subjected to the most devious negotiation and eventually knocked down to him for five shillings and ninepence, completed his wardrobe.

“How do I seem?” he demanded of his wife, having struggled into these garments and, finding no mirror, being forced to make do with his reflection in the teakettle.

“Indeed, John, you look very well.”

“A band for the hat? But no, that’s scarcely necessary. What about gloves?”

In the end it was decided that a pair of gloves could be procured from Mrs. Hook, a seamstress who inhabited the room above. Throughout this investiture Dewar’s expression, which he was careful to disguise from his wife, was of the most melancholic cast. He knew that, however ignorant he might be of the ultimate purpose of Grace’s scheme, he was engaged in what he had assured himself inwardly was some kind of “dodge.” This feeling was made doubly worse by the clothes in which he was now caparisoned and the silk hat that hung from his hand. It seemed to him that he could scarcely venture into the street beyond his house without risking exposure, that the very policemen who directed the traffic would look upon him with eager eyes. Gradually, by slow degrees, this feeling left him. He had, as far as he knew, not yet committed any crime. It might be—and to this hope he clung like a condemned man who has been offered one last hope of pardon—that the task before him was less suspicious—more honest—than it seemed.

It was inevitable that something of this disquiet should communicate itself to his wife, and on the evening of the day in which his sartorial transformation was complete, Mrs. Dewar observed somewhat gravely, “It does not seem to me, John, that you are happy about this work that you’ve to do.”

“Well…no. Perhaps I am not. Not very. You see,” he improvised, conscious of his inability to communicate any of the fears that burned within him, “it is such a deuce of a way. And of course I don’t like to leave you.”

“I shall do very well.” (Mrs. Dewar’s face, which was chalk-white, belied this assertion.) “Mrs. Hook has promised to see after my meals. And, you know, John, it is important that you should make a success of this chance.”

“Well, yes, there’s that of course.” But Dewar’s countenance, as he
said this, did not make it appear as if he regarded success as a very probable outcome.

Two days passed, at the conclusion of which Dewar’s nervousness had reached such a pitch that he had almost determined upon selling the suit and other appurtenances with a view to returning the five sovereigns. Then, on the morning of the third day after his encounter with Mr. Grace, the postman—not an official seen very often in the vicinity of Clerkenwell Court—could be heard ascending the rickety stairs to deliver a letter. Sent from an address in Carter Lane, it contained, as Grace had promised, a banknote for fifty pounds, a summary of the instructions previously tendered and an injunction to convey himself to Great Yarmouth as speedily as he could. The letter was received at nine in the morning. At ten, dressed with a punctiliousness that won the instant approval of Messrs. Bulstrode’s commissionaire, which gentleman swept open the vestibule door with a respectful flourish, Dewar presented himself at Lothbury. Nothing, it appeared to him from the warmth of his reception, could be easier than the opening of a bank account in the name of Mr. James Roper or the concluding of an agreement with Messrs. Bulstrode’s East Anglian agents, and by eleven he was on his way to the Shoreditch Railway Station. Here he paid eleven shillings and threepence for a return ticket to Great Yarmouth, surrendered his valise to a porter and was installed in a second-class carriage curiously impregnated with the scent of aniseed and containing an old woman with a Pekinese dog in a wire travelling basket.

“He’s a very good dog, sir,” this lady said. “Never bitten a person yet. Not even when he was a puppy.”

Dewar remarked that he was very glad to hear it.

“And yet it’s a fact, sir, that he can’t abide travelling. Never could, and never will yet.”

Dewar observed that this was very surprising.

Eventually, in a great hiss of vapour and disturbed air, the train bore them away out of Shoreditch into a queer hinterland of smoke-blackened chimney stacks and meandering tributaries of the river, their surface rainbow-hued with oil, past warehouses whose sombre frontages hung low in the water, and ancient manufactories whose
windows had known no glass and whose roofs had known no slates, beneath great, black-bricked viaducts tilted monstrously against the sky, alongside immense, sprawling cemeteries where the gravestones lay all tumbled together under fantastic outgrowths of sooty foliage. Everything—the chimney stacks, the greeny-black skirts of the warehouses, the ledges of the viaducts and the gaunt palings of the cemeteries—dripped rainwater, off which the rays of a weak sun intermittently flashed, so that the effect was of a dozen little candles suddenly gleaming into life out of a fog of greyness and being just as suddenly extinguished. The old lady sucked caraway comfits for a while and then went to sleep with her mouth open, exposing a row of yellow teeth the colour of pianoforte keys, and the dog, howling a little at this abandonment, burrowed deep into his basket as if he genuinely believed that he might contrive an escape through the square of tin sheeting that constituted its base.

All this Dewar watched, without finding any salve for his dissatisfaction. There was a conspicuousness about his position that he wholly distrusted. It seemed to him that, clad in his black suit, silk hat balanced on his knees, he was a kind of exhibit at a public gallery that men might be invited to step forward and appraise. This self-consciousness preyed upon his mind and made him nervous. Were the guard to come tramping along the corridor, he would shrink into the corner of the carriage like a man pursued. Were, at the several stations along the line, an old woman to put her head in at the window offering newspapers and trays of hardbake, he started up in his seat in terror. At Ipswich the old lady woke up, pronounced a final encomium over her wire basket and was escorted away across the platform by a female relative, but her successor, a dark and silent man who trimmed his nails into a pocket handkerchief, Dewar did not like at all, believing him to be a police inspector travelling incognito who desired only the obscurity of a tunnel to leap up and apply a set of handcuffs.

It was no better at Norwich, where he was compelled to wait two hours for a connecting train and skulked miserably around the city in the grasp of a zealous porter, examining an ancient cathedral and a castle-cum-prison whose gardens were tended by men in zebra clothes with equal indifference. It is a scant twenty miles from Norwich to Great Yarmouth, across a great bare flat covered by a myriad of wind
mills, and yet Dewar wished the distance were two hundred. However, on reaching his destination he was pleased to discover—something that would have seemed impossible to him four hours before—that he was at any rate alive, that no lions had eaten him, or attempted to eat him, and that the porters, railway men and tourist touts whom he encountered treated him with an agreeable civility. In this way his spirits improved, and carrying his valise out of the station—it was by now about four o’clock in the afternoon—he absolutely stopped to ask an old man in a smock holding the bridle of a dray horse where in Yarmouth he might stay and if, in addition, there were anything in the town worth seeing? Finding that persons of quality generally put up at Bates’s Hotel and that the beach contained a wonderful houseboat that Mr. Dickens had put into one of his novels, he determined to be taken instantly to the former and to spend a part of the next morning examining the latter.

Alas, Great Yarmouth out of season is a dreary place—at least I have always found it so. There is a promenade, running in parallel to the sea for nearly a mile, over which the spray gusts with unappeasable ardour; there is a north wind which blows directly down from Jutland; there are a couple of theatres which, though displaying the most inviting notices of past and forthcoming attractions, are always shut up; and a Thursday bazaar, always threatening to break out into a rash of “sixpenny sales,” “shilling auctions” and the like, but, in point of fact, closed on all seven days of the week. Quite how the inhabitants of the town may be thought to occupy themselves between the months of October and March I do not know, for the shops are always shut and the streets always empty.

Having risen early the next morning, proceeded to the telegraph office, where he communicated his address to Carter Lane, investigated the sailors’ reading room, which contained a rheumy-eyed copy of the
Yarmouth Mercury
and a cannonball supposedly discharged at Trafalgar, and examined the exterior of the houseboat on the beach that Mr. Dickens had put into one of his novels (the interior proving unnavigable as it contained a family of nine persons), Dewar felt that he had exhausted the town’s possibilities.

On the next day, however, there came a further letter from Carter
Lane. This he examined with great alarm, for it disclosed to him the precise nature of his business in Great Yarmouth. Specifically, he was to visit that morning in the character of Mr. Roper the offices of two of the town’s solicitors. At each he was to represent himself as the creditor of a gentleman named Nokes, living at an address in Peckham, and request that a letter be written soliciting the payment of debts to the value of £150. He was then to retire to his hotel and wait until such time as the solicitors communicated with him. All this—and in truth there was not much more than a page of it—Dewar read half a dozen or even a dozen times, so anxious was he to commit these instructions to memory.

Then, with his hat in his hand and the gravest foreboding in his heart, he stepped out into the high street with the aim of executing his commissions. Again, though, as with the bank at Lothbury, nothing could have exceeded the civility that greeted his appearance at these legal portals. In each case he was swiftly admitted, inducted with the merest delay into the presence of a partner in the firm, heard respectfully and assured that the letter would be written forthwith. He was staying at Bates’s Hotel? Well, it would be their pleasure to communicate with him there. At the second of these offices discreet mention was made of the need for a reference. Dewar, though he felt sure that the beating of his heart could be heard by passersby outside in the street, gritted his teeth, referred the questioner in his blandest manner to Messrs. Gurney, with whom he believed his own bankers corresponded, and was bowed out onto the staircase in the manner of a modern Croesus. All in all, Dewar reflected, as he made his way back to his hotel, through air that now seemed to carry a rank odour of fish, it could all have been a great deal worse. Again, no lion had eaten him, or even attempted to eat him. In all his undertakings he had met only lambs.