Mr. Timothy: A Novel (5 page)

One of them catches sight of me now. An old man, sun-stropped, in a pilot jacket and canvas trousers. For the barest of seconds, his rheumy eyes spark and glint, and then he remembers: I am the fellow who comes here every morning, bringing nothing but his own body.

--Morning, sir, he says, grudgingly.

--Morning.

We return to our separate vigils, and mine may well be happier, for if there's a better vantage point on the river, I don't know of it. Sit and watch the sun lighting up Waterloo Bridge, scrubbing the face of St. Paul's pink. Watch the seagulls circling an empty coal barge. Feel the slow rocking of the jetty, the lapping and slapping of water against the piles.

It's a little shy of ten in the morning. The sky is cold and clear, crisp as a carrot, the river's summertime stink is just a memory, and the woollen tangle of the fog is holding off for now--a mercy in December--waiting until late in the afternoon to press its chloroform compress to your nostrils. And such is the beneficent influence of the weather that my leg, for the first time in a week, has ceased its throbbing. It courses with a new life. Oh, the possibilities of me! I could run from Hyde Park to Southwark. I could do handstands across Blackfriars Bridge. I could swim to Dover, if I had ever learned to swim.

What is this but a sign of grace? And as I cast my eyes about, the benediction spreads across the entire scene. It sweeps a gentling hand over the plane trees, hurriedly shedding their skins. A pair of sailors, feet intertwined, sleeping off last night's toot. A coffee shop, pregnant with day labourers. A blacking factory, long abandoned. Everything is at peace, and the calm extends even to my father, sitting quietly on the end of the pier in a broad blue coat, whittling a pipe from a block of planed wood.

How could I have missed him? The tight, narrow ridge of the shoulders. The hands at once panicked and resourceful. The whole fidgeting, funnelling way of him.
Waiting
for me, not twenty yards off.

It would take me perhaps half a minute to cross the distance between us--enough time for him to escape, certainly. I would be tapping some strange man on the shoulder and mumbling an apology, and the stranger would be shrugging me off like a midge, and if I were quick about it, I might whirl round just in time to see Father flying down the river, disappearing over Westminster.

No, approaching him is out of the question; better to speak from where I am. But Father, I am dumb in your presence. If you would but turn and rest your eyes on mine, it might jar a word loose, and then everything else would surely follow. My new situation and two or three of the more disreputable friends I've made and what happens when a fight breaks out in the gallery of the Old Vic and what a dead horse looks like when it's pulled from the Thames. And I could bring you all the latest news! Uncle N yet breathes, can you credit it? Peter's wife is still barren, more's the pity, but the salon (as Peter calls it) pulls along nicely. No word of Belinda--I've nearly given up hope on that score. And Martha...well, I haven't seen her since your funeral. That lout of a husband won't let her out of doors, I imagine. Or perhaps it's just too hard for her to look us in the eye any more.

Oh, I would tell you everything, Father. I'd write it down in a letter if I could be sure of your reading it. I would tell you how sorry I am for not knowing you while there was still time. That part would be either very brief or very long, I'm not sure which.

And look! The audience I wished for is about to take place. The man on the pier is turning his head. Revolving it into profile. And it will be only a matter of time, surely, before our eyes connect and speech pours forth and whatever comes after speech. And who can say how long this moment will last? Who dares predict?

But the profile that reveals itself in the morning light is altogether foreign. Ruddy and blotched and hairy, with the brine-cured features of a lifelong sea dweller, a man who's sixty if he's a day, and squinting so hard his eyelids nearly curl over on themselves.

Such a strange medium for Father to occupy! But perhaps he had no choice.

In any case, he's gone. Only his enchantment lingers after him. It muffles the sounds of the tugboats and the coal waggons and the omnibus making its cumbersome way down the hill from Camden Town. It diffuses the light but also sharpens it in peculiar ways, so that the passengers shivering on the omnibus's top tier blur from view even as a familiar figure flattened against a peeling grey building flares up like a cathedral cherub.

An odd sort of building to choose as a refuge: a naval outfitter's store, the Rollicking Tar, slated for extinction but with its inventory still intact. In the front window sits a large teak model of a man-of-war, the kind that once chased Napoleon's navy across the main, and no doubt every other item in the store dates from the same era: tarnished quadrants and sextants, mottled chronometers and unwieldy compasses, chapped oilskin jackets. And biscuits hard as hawser hooks, one of which she is now clutching in her hand. Collected it from the rubbish, very like, and in God knows what state of petrifaction, but she's making it do, gnawing it down from every corner.

Even from this distance, I can see more of her than I could the other night, when she was draped under that tarpaulin. I can see the oval face and black brows and patrician nose. A pair of bare twiggy arms, poking through the muttony sleeves of a plain black woollen dress. A white apron, filthy, drooping down to her knees. Battered leather shoes, the tops yawning away from the soles. And a canopy of black hair, tied back with a large bright-red ribbon.

The ribbon is what makes her interesting.

Because she needn't have bothered, do you see that? Hurrying though she must have been, she yet took a moment, wrenched a still interval from her chaos, to reimpose order. Didn't just slap the thing on, either. Wound it very carefully several times round, placed and tied it with great intention. Perhaps even inspected her effort in the glass of the shop window. An aesthetic impulse--an
aristocratic
impulse.
She yawns. Wipes her hand across her mouth. And before I'm even on my feet, she has disappeared.

I run down to the store as fast as my stiffened legs will take me, but I might have flown for all the difference it makes. No sign of her. No tarpaulin chrysalis, not even a crumb of the biscuit she was eating. Just me and that lavishly fitted man-of-war in the storefront window, sailing off to meet Napoleon.

Chapter 4

IN MRS. SHARPE'S ESTABLISHMENT, I am reckoned something of a toff. The girls see my double-breasted worsted lounge suit, my peg-top trousers and braces, my silk hat, my front-laced half-boots, my double albert with fob...they see a gentleman who has wandered off course--an
haut bourgeois manque
. But here on Threadneedle Street, gathered into the cold bosom of the Bank of England, subjected to the lizard gaze of a captain of finance named Otterbourne, I am revealed as something else: a climber. Worse: a climber with his feet already slipping off the rungs. The light from the ground-glass windows calls my deficits to attention. Boots streaked and cudgelled by hard use. Worsted a little worse for the wear. The debauched stripes of my braces, the hothouse wilt of my shirt collars.

Mr. Otterbourne's collars, by contrast, do not wilt. They stand as inviolable as chalk cliffs, and over his shoulder leans an equally inviolable clerk, bending his body like the arm of a drawbridge and gesturing almost subliminally towards the small, square document three inches from the Otterbourne elbow.

--Ah, yes, says the captain of finance.

Around us, black-coated clerks pass in stately measure. A damp newspaper hisses from a fender. The smells of leather and mahogany fill the air, and a young boy ladles lumps of coal, one by one, into a coal box, pausing over each lump as though he were performing unction.

New boots
, I am thinking.
This month's installment goes to new boots
.

--Thank you, Greeley, says Mr. Otterbourne.

The clerk bows and, without changing posture, melts imperceptibly into the distance. Remarkable effect: if I didn't know better, I'd think
I
were the one falling soundlessly away. Do they teach that in clerk school? I wonder. Was it in Father's bag of tricks as well?

--Mr. Cratchit.

With a damp finger, Otterbourne smooths each of his thin, ruddy eyebrows.

--I am obliged to tell you that your uncle has attached a new condition to your stipend.

--Yes? --According to this most recent proviso--may I read it?--"before making any additional draughts on this account, said beneficiary must, at his own convenience and on his own recognisance, pay said benefactor a personal call, in the nature of an at-home visit."

--At-home visit?

--Yes.

He looks up from his paper. His head tilts delicately to the left.

--I am authorised to supply the address, Mr. Cratchit, if it has escaped you.

Deep inside my chest, a bubble of heat escapes through a wrenched-open grate. I feel it shimmering in my voice.

--And once there, Mr. Otterbourne, am I to beg? Am I to get down on my knees?

--I'm afraid the proviso says nothing one way or the other about begging. Or knees.

Smiling is something of a foreign language for old Otterbourne, and so once he has made a token stab in that direction, his face realigns itself into the shell I have to come to know tolerably well. He is the sort of man who absorbs light without ever imparting it.

--And you mean to say this is my only option? I ask.--No other capital at hand? No investments?

--As best as I can determine, Mr. Cratchit, you have a small sum in the consolidated annuities, to which you will have no access for some years to come. The rest is housed in government-backed funds, and in order to draw on these, lamentably, you would need the approval of your countersignatory, said countersignatory being in this case--

--My uncle.

--The same.

I settle back into my chair. My hands form a screen over the ridge of my eyes, which offers the dual advantage of shielding me from Otterbourne's gaze and allowing me to study my boots in all their disrepair.

--When must this visit be paid? I ask.

--Whenever you wish.

--And until I do...

--Until you do, yes.

He strokes the blotting pad on his red-pine desk.

--If it's any comfort, Mr. Cratchit, I have known far more onerous conditions to be attached to the disbursal of funds. Just last week, one of our account holders was required to hop two hundred paces about Leicester Square. Grew dizzy and fainted dead away. The stories these walls could tell, Mr. Cratchit!

--Stories, yes.

To think that only six months ago, I swore I wouldn't take another shilling from him. Swore it up and down.

Beneath me, a blue pattern swarms across a Persian rug, coils its back, darts its dragon tongue towards my heel. I pull my foot away. I give my boots one more turn of the eye.

--Tell him I'll come when I can. As soon as I can.

--I have no charge to tell him anything, Mr. Cratchit. He waits. That is all he wishes you to know.

Threadneedle Street is a good distance from my usual haunts, so by the time I've made it back to my spot at the Hungerford Stairs, it's nearly noon. The tide is out now, and where the river has retreated, a tribe of young nomads has advanced. Amphibious creatures, scavenging the foreshore for coal, for wood, nails, chains, files, hinges--anything, anything at all. They're a small species, mostly, but in their robes of mud, they look quite ageless: one can't be sure whether the boy digging a key chain out of the riverbed is six or eighty-four. Some of the more adventurous are swimming out to the barges and knocking off lengths of rope or iron scales. A kind of etiquette prevails here: the mudlarks don't consider anything their property until it's touched water. If a bargee interrupts them before they can make off with a cask, they leave it unmolested. Once it has left the safety of the deck, it belongs to them. They swoop down on it with an animal cry, hug it to their breasts, and paddle to shore with the shouts of the bargees trailing after them like steam from a whistle.

Not a bad afternoon's entertainment, although it does make me feel older than I am, if only because it reminds me that London is a city of children. Any day now, I expect the proclamation that makes it official. Her Majesty's subjects, behold: children on every side of you! Stealing nuts from a barrow. Swiping brooches and combs from a stall on Mile End Road. Pulling panes off sweetshops in Oxford Street, snatching rolls of calico from a linen draper in Spitalfields. Wrestling with dogs for two-day-old apple cores.

Indefatigable, these creatures, and proliferating at an insane rate. I shouldn't be surprised if they all rose up one day, stormed Whitehall and the Lord Mayor's palace and the royal apartments, slashed our white quivering throats, plucked out our gibbering tongues. There would be no pity, I can tell you. Look into their eyes if you don't believe me. Something missing, you see? Something that doesn't come back.

I remember stumbling across a whole colony of them one night. I was coming off the ferry at the Adelphi Stairs, and they were crouched beneath the arches, the very poorest of the poor-- not even a penny for lodging. So little clothing left on their bodies one had to wonder why they bothered with clothing. Their eyes had vanished inside great dark planetary orbits, their faces
glowed
with hunger. Watching them lick their lips, wipe their hands in mad, endless cycles, I knew, with the force of revelation, that they wanted to eat me. And if I hadn't been surrounded by fellow passengers, and if two of the older lads hadn't been busy lifting hankies, who can say what my fate would have been? I think I might have tasted all right. Of course, the Adelphi colonists are the children of darkness. The children of early morning are a brighter, nervier lot. With their avian industry and their high, coded calls, they create a distinct musical idiom, and there are times when I wish I still had an ear for it. But today I'm all eyes.