The Blue Last (5 page)

He stopped again near the corner of Cheapside. Here, if his modicum of geography served him right, was almost hallowed ground for here had stood the Mermaid Tavern until the Great Fire of 1666. He stood looking at the building here now and envisioning what had gone before, until the one peeled away and the Mermaid emerged (not, perhaps true to itself, but wasn't the shell of one public house pretty much like another?). In his mind's eye he entered to find it smokier, rowdier and filled with more raucous laughter and louder screams for beer than could be witnessed at his pub in Islington, the Angel. There were no women, nary a one, except for the barmaid, her breasts spilling out of her loosely laced shift.

And since his imaginings landed him in the first part of the seventeenth century—there they sat, ranged around a table, men more sagacious, less bemused than any others he could name: Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, Walter Raleigh (who had founded this “club”) and in a shadowy corner Dr. Johnson, the only one standing in case he wanted to make a quick exit and the only one as yet unborn.

Jury thought it remarkable that all of these icons of literature could be gathered in the same room, sitting around the same table. He wanted to know what they thought. So he told them the story in the photos. None of them but only half attended to him for they laughed and quipped all the while (Webster asking,
“Is this, then, what the Peelers have come to? If you lit all the lamps in London could this man find his feet?”
)

“You know what it sounds like?”
said Webster.

“
I do indeed, Mr. Webster,”
said Beaumont.
“Sounds like someone's stolen my plot of
The Changeling.”

“Don't be ridiculous,”
said Shakespeare.
“It's a tale told by an idiot, et cetera, et cetera.”
He banged his tankard on the table and yelled for ale through the smoke and coal-dusted air.

Ben Jonson called for
“a cup o' Canary wine, now, Megs!”

The buxom barmaid waved her hand. “My point is,” said Jury, “should I believe it?”

All seven of them sat transfixed by the idiocy of this question. Then they found it wonderfully risible.

Megs had come, laces dancing, and answered him:
“If it's belief as concerns you, sir, you just step across the street to St. Mary-le-Bow.”

“Ah, but they might come along and burn him for high treason,”
yelled Fletcher.

Jury stuck to his guns, for here was more sagacity than he would meet in his lifetime: “Is it true?”

Unborn or not, Samuel Johnson couldn't keep still.
“The man's dying, you fool; why would he waste his time talking about this impersonation if it hadn't occurred or something else occurred enough like it to ribbon the tale round with such finery as would secure your aid. He needs your help, man, though I must say, help from you is about as necessary as t'was Chesterton's.”

Jury did not know what he meant; Dr. Johnson did not enlighten him, but faded back into the shadows again.

Jury thought: yet there's something in the advice he should pay attention to but, in the way of elusive clues, he could not see what.

“You're all intuitionists.”

They regarded one another with a raised eyebrow, a questioning glance, a finger pointed in Jury's direction.

Refusing to give up, Jury said, “Intuit. Go on.”

Donne, who had joined less in the raillery around the table, cleared his throat and said,
“You undertake to help this man because you feel his story is yours.”

“Yes. No. I wasn't posing as someone else. Not that part of the story.”

Donne waved this away, saying,
“That's merely the pièce de résistance to engage your interest; it's merely a corner turned in the real mystery and is insignificant.”

“But it's the
whole
mystery. It's the one question to be answered.”

“Looking around? Looking around for
what
? Pardon me, but you're talking in riddles.”

“Riddles!”
said Beaumont.
“It's
you
who're hearing them; he's not talking them.”

“You're too insistent, Mr. Jury,”
said Webster,
“on your own notion of mystery. Probably because you're one of these detective types such as our so-called writers in Grubb Street write about, composers of temporary poems and bad detective novels,”
said Fletcher.

“It's not that simple—”

“Of course it is,”
said Webster.
“A hundred hacks in Grubb Street right this moment are writing their detective tales-”

“Century! Century!”
bellowed Dr. Johnson.
“There are no detective stories until E. A. Poe!”

“You're past it, mate,”
said Fletcher to Jury.

“Can't see the woods for the trees,”
said Beaumont, adding,
“who said that, anyway?”

Fuck you two, Jury thought. Couple of pricks. “Thank you, Mr. Donne and Dr. Johnson. I know you're trying to help. Unlike some others I could name.” He cast a baleful look at Beaumont and Fletcher, then asked, “Just what
did
you guys write?” Jury was pleased to see the pink flush across their faces.

“T'is Pity She's a Whore,”
called out Ben Jonson.
“Megs, Megs! We're talking about you! More wine! An excellent play! Ran six months in the Duchess.”

Dr. Johnson turned to bang his head against one of the tavern's stout beams.
“Century, you idiot! That theater wasn't even built for several hundred years!”

Ben Jonson was engaged in tweaking the good Megs's bottom, and said,
“Yes, you're right.”

“Of course,”
said Shakespeare,
“one wonders about Sam back there. You're not the one to talk, Sam, for what are you doing here?”

Only silence inhabited the shadows for some moments. Then Samuel Johnson said,
“Patrolling. One has to patrol. One has to oversee the literary scene. I wouldn't mind it except for this blockhead who keeps following me.”

Then Jury watched the scene dissolve and turned his feet in the direction of Ludgate Hill. Could one feel both elated and deflated simultaneously? Apparently one could, he told himself, ruefully. It was only minutes to Ludgate and then to the cramped little streets that hemmed in the construction site. He stood looking at the blank face of it for some moments before taking out Mickey's picture of the Blue Last.

It showed a three-storied building, much like the houses around it, gabled, dormer-windowed and with a door painted darker than the rest of the structure. It was the Christmas four or five days before the bombs fell. The Christmas decorations—the strings of lights that ran across the edge of the roof and around the downstairs windows—struck Jury as awfully sad. In front of the pub stood a man, Francis Croft, and Oliver Tynedale's daughter, Alexandra. They stood smiling and slightly blinded by the winter sunlight. In just a few days their lives, and the lives of all the families of whoever was unlucky enough to be in the pub—all would be horribly and irrevocably changed.

Alexandra Herrick, even in this faint and awkward likeness, could be seen to be beautiful, though you had to imagine her coloring, which Jury had no trouble doing. The baby would probably be beautiful also. Here, she was wrapped in a blanket. Then he looked at the one of the baby looking over Alexandra's shoulder.

Jury studied the picture of Kitty Riordin holding her own baby, Erin, wearing a little cap also looking over her mother's shoulder. How could what Mickey believed be possible? How could one child be substituted for another and no one know? If he himself had seen both children and then had been asked to identify one or the other-—? He doubted if he could. But the mothers would know. That, of course, was Mickey's point. If Kitty said the baby she had taken out in the stroller was Maisie Tynedale Herrick, who would contradict her? Who would want to? In Maisie's case there was a grandfather, uncles, aunts—an entire roster of people who would want Maisie alive far more than they'd care if Erin was. It would take the most hardened cynic—this was war, after all—to pose such a devastating question to Kitty Riordin, a woman whose own child had very probably died inside the Blue Last, buried under the debris—no. Mickey was right to be suspicious; it could well have been, still could be, an imposture.

But the alternative was equally possible: Alexandra's baby, Maisie, really was Maisie, and Mickey was wrong. Jury stood looking at the blank face of an office building before him, which served as a kind of screen on which he could project his thoughts.

London in the dreadful last months of 1940. He had heard people who'd been here then say that if you could hear that searing whistle, the bomb had already missed you and gone down somewhere else. In the spring of that year, people were calling it the phoney war. Men and women in their seventies now, talking about the blackouts, how you couldn't go anywhere after dark because you couldn't see. “Always stumbling over the goddamned sandbags, picking your way through the dark, in a block of terraced houses, going up a path and trying to open the wrong door.” One man said he almost welcomed a storm so people could navigate by lightning flashes. No light, no torches, no headlamps—the blackness was like a cave, “like wandering about in a bloody
cave,
it was.” Jury thought he heard his uncle's voice saying this. It's what he himself must have felt in the months after their own flat in the Fulham Road had taken a direct hit. Seeing his mum lying under a ton of rubble.

But had it happened? Had he been there? Was this the reason he hadn't wanted to be forced back in time, was it that he had begun to question his own memory?

Despite his earlier thoughts about his cousin, he now had the urge to ring her in Newcastle, see what she remembered. Better yet, he would go there. Only, he warned himself, she would not treat memory kindly; she was likely to remember what would make him unhappy, what sad, and even embellish on the sadness of it.

For he knew, if he knew anything, it had been and would be sad.

B
enny Keegan and his dog Sparky climbed the cement steps and crossed to the other side of the Embankment to get the bus to take them across Waterloo Bridge to the South Bank.

Benny made deliveries for several small merchants in Southwark. He knew he couldn't compete with the swift, helmeted bicycle messengers, but then speed wasn't everything (he'd told his prospective employers). “Sparky adds a bit of fun to your customers' day.” Benny (and Sparky) had been hired by the five shops he'd solicited, three of them because Sparky did indeed put a bit of fun in the day. The other two, newsagent and butcher, had agreed to give him a try because Benny (and Sparky) worked cheap. That had been a year ago.

So there were Mr. Siptick, the newsagent; the butcher, Mr. Gyp; the two young men at Delphinium, the flower shop, who reminded Benny of flowers themselves, tall, thin, pastel-colored flowers; the greengrocer, Mr. Smith; and Miss Penforwarden, who owned the Moonraker Bookshop.

These five shops were all handily within a few blocks so that Benny could go from one to the other, making out a schedule for deliveries as he went. He would do this once in the morning and again in the afternoon, to see if any other deliveries had been added. He was very efficient and his way of handling his business worked quite smoothly.

He wouldn't have exchanged his day of irregular work for a regular job for anything (not that he had the opportunity to, as he was only twelve).

During the time between deliveries, and there was always some time, he could stop and have a rest and a look around the shops he served. His favorite was the Moonraker. Waiting for Miss Penforwarden to make up her delivery orders, he could take down a book and read. Sparky would sit and not bother anything, not even the Moonraker's cat, who tried everything in its power to get Sparky to chase it. Sparky didn't. Benny did not know where Sparky had learned such discipline, unless he'd been part of a circus or magic act before Benny had found him that day, nosing through a dustbin. All Benny had ever taught Sparky was how to carry things in his mouth. Newspapers and magazines were easy. But Sparky could even be trusted by the Delphinium owners to carry flowers. To the cone of vibrantly pink paper wrapped around the flowers, they would attach a string handle by which Sparky could carry the bouquet remarkably ably. Sparky loved flowers. Whenever they stopped at Delphinium, Sparky would make a circuit of the wide, cool room, stopping to sniff each kind of flower, bunched in its tall metal holder. The bluebells were his favorite, even though they made him sneeze sometimes. The Delphinium owners would often give Benny, at the end of the day, whatever flowers they thought wouldn't sit well overnight. They said for him to take them to his mum. Benny said he would and thanked them and went off.

He only wished he didn't have to make up so many stories about his mum and her daily dealings. How she was really an actress, but had to do waitress work to make money until she got her big break. The trouble with making up a story was that you had to remember to stick with it and flesh it out with all kinds of detail, such as where his mum waited on tables.
Lyon's Corner House, oh that closed, did it? Well, I meant when it was still open. Right now she waits tables in the food hall at Harrods; no, I know they don't have tables, just counter work, I mean.
It was such a strain.