The Streets Page 18

  At that moment, a bell sounded from the entrance hall, and a clerk entered the room to announce the beginning of another session. My father lowered his head, and pinched his eyelids closed again.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry, David, but my time is circumscribed by –’ He waved a vague hand to indicate his professional obligation. Around us, the dark-clad delegates had begun their obedient shuffle towards the door, tobacco smoke trailing in their wake. We followed them out and had reached the top of the staircase when he said, in an undertone, ‘This subject we discussed just now – you said it was a cause of “trouble” to you?’

  ‘Yes . . . I have long wondered whether a criminal – a thief, say – was naturally born. But your words put me on the side of optimism.’ We stared at one another, aware of so much unsaid between us. I offered my hand, which he took. ‘So – I am grateful.’

  I was turning away when he called me back. Another half-smile came to his tired, bone-shadowed face. ‘By the bye, I must beg your leave not to address me so formally. Papa was good enough once – is it not still?’

  I nodded, our eyes met, and I muttered a farewell.

  A throbbing sun glinted through Bloomsbury’s foliage, its fierce heat slowing the world about me. A cart horse had been parked by a public fountain to slake its thirst, and a sluggish hansom kicked up a cloud of dust as it ambled by. Flower sellers were fanning themselves on the concourse outside Euston Station. An Italian organ-grinder wiped the back of his neck with a rag, and cranked out a desultory, half-hearted tune. London was wilting.

  Curiosity, mingled with alarm, drew my steps back to the Records Office where I had made my original discoveries – first of Moyles’s slum monopoly, then of the leases transferred to Condor Holdings. I still clung to a vague hope that Paget’s copy boy had somehow been mistaken, that he had perhaps consulted the wrong listing. I had the Somers Town ledger in front of me now, and turning its lined pages I knew straight away there had been no mistake. As the boy had reported, the names on the leases had been changed for a second time: Condor Holdings had been whited out, replaced by multiple strips bearing the names of new leaseholders. Who on earth were these people?

  ‘Who on earth are these people?’ I asked the desk clerk, the disobliging one I had encountered on my previous visit. He lifted his head, very slowly.

  ‘They are the new leaseholders,’ he replied in a profoundly uninterested tone. He didn’t recognise me, which was just as well.

  ‘So all of these leases,’ I said, riffling the pages, ‘have changed hands in the last six weeks, but nobody thinks it . . . unusual.’ Again, he raised his eyes to mine, and his expression made it clear that a verbal reply would not be forthcoming. He returned to his work. I waited for a moment and then, just to vex him, said in an innocent voice, ‘May I borrow this volume?’

  ‘Sir – this is a Records Office, not a lending library,’ he snapped. I had succeeded in exasperating him. Taking the ledger round the corner to another desk, out of his sight, I ran my eye down the first page of fresh corrections. They listed houses on Johnson Street, and the leases were divided amongst five names:

  Annie O’Brien

  Harriet Shepherd

  George Harding

  Edith Arkell

  Thomas Bowland-Darke

  I stared at them for some moments. I knew Johnson Street; it was in a state of near collapse. The question was this: why would people risk their money on condemned properties? All they would have needed to do was inspect the house and see the NOTICE TO QUIT sign in the window. Baffling. I had to remember these names . . .

  There was nobody occupying the desks either side of me. As long as a clerk didn’t suddenly appear I was invisible to the room. Gripping the edge of the page I stealthily began tearing along its margin; halfway down, the rasping noise sounded like a firework’s crackle, so I gave the chair I was sitting upon a sudden jerk. The squeal of wood on parquet muffled the final liberating rip. The desk clerk gave a loud tut, but he didn’t stand up to investigate the chair-scraper. I folded the torn page into my coat pocket, handed in the ledger at the desk, and strolled out.

  Each day of the following week I set off early for Somers Town, and spent the mornings checking on which houses had been earmarked for destruction. Generally I would find two or three in a street; but sometimes a whole terrace had been boarded up in preparation for the wrecking ball. My mind was not, I confess, exclusively focused upon this task. It was no longer possible to walk these pavements without thinking of Roma, and I was always half hopeful, half fearful of running into her. Yet however much I haunted the place, I caught no sight of her. It felt as though she knew I was on the lookout, and so had deliberately made herself scarce.

  Our paths did finally cross, on the Friday evening. I had arranged to meet Jo for a bite to eat at Casti’s, but nearly an hour had passed and still there was no sign of him. I had just convinced myself that he had forgotten our appointment when into the dining room came Roma, and I flinched as her gaze sought me out. When I looked up she was opposite me, her arms folded.

  ‘No need for that,’ she said, as I made to rise. ‘I’m just here to say that Jo’s not comin’. He’s in bed, coughin’ like a horse.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ I said, ‘. . . and I’m sorrier still that you’ve been avoiding me. Would you . . .?’ I gestured at the vacant chair. She stood, considering, her expression proudly aloof.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to apologise, and win back your good opinion.’

  ‘Oh. What made you think you had my good opinion?’

  There was nothing in that for me, and I shrank from her lowering gaze. Then I heard the slight scrape of chair legs. She had sat down, silent, with the air of one whose time was given up on sufferance. After a moment she said coolly, ‘So?’

  ‘When Kitty came into that train carriage to tell us – about the ring – I believe that an involuntary glance I directed at you conveyed the impression – that is, it may have appeared that I suspected you of . . .’

  ‘Stealing,’ she prompted.

  ‘– but I did not. I would never accuse you –’

  ‘You didn’t have to accuse me. I seen it on your face. You thought I was a thief.’

  I shook my head. ‘No, Roma, I did not think that. I looked at you only because you had noticed the ring earlier, and had remarked upon it. I would know if you were a thief.’

  She snorted her disbelief. ‘Oh, yeah? And how’s that?’

  ‘Because I am one,’ I replied. ‘Indeed, I have served time in prison for it.’

  Her sceptical expression had gone: she squinted uncertainly. ‘What? You – a thief? I don’t believe it.’

  I made a thin tsk. ‘That, I recall, is precisely what my landlady said on seeing the police clap me in handcuffs.’ As I spoke, I felt both remorse and a curious liberation. ‘Whether you care to believe me or not, it’s the truth. I was charged, I was convicted – and I was sent down. It is not a part of my life I would happily confess. You are the first person I have told since my release.’

  She was frowning, unsure of how to respond. Around us the indistinct mumble of other diners continued, not caring. I had always imagined my shameful history as something lying in wait for me, ready to spring an ambush with its fangs bared. The secret had stalked me since the day I came out – from Reading, the previous November – and it had seemed only a matter of time before I was exposed, once the son of a respectable family, now a convicted felon. It had never occurred to me that I would confess it voluntarily. But I would rather that Roma knew the worst of me than to think I had suspected her a thief. I considered her now, her almond-shaped eyes, the tiny mole set at about twenty past four from her nose. The expressive arch of her eyebrows.

  ‘What happened?’ she said, searching my face.

  And so I told her the whole story, beginning with my arrival at Fowler’s College. You must take into account my ingenuous nature, coddled by my parents till the age of thirteen, entir
ely unsocialised apart from companionship with our sixty-year-old gardener and his wife, then without warning plunged into the brutish atmosphere of this academy for ‘young gentlemen’ in rural Berkshire. I was not so badly bullied as some, though over five years the necessities of survival surely coarsened me. Aged nearly eighteen I left the place, without prospects, but rather than return home a failure I determined I should make something of myself. The town of Caversham, the nearest to the academy, was my next port of call, and with a little money my father had given me, I found rooms there. I found a job, too, assistant at a printer’s, ill-paid and dreary, but tolerable withal.

  And there I might have remained, keeping the ‘noiseless tenor’ of my way like so many others, but for an ache that spurred me onwards. That ache, simply put, was loneliness. The few friends I had made at school were already dispersed, and I fell back on the company of the only decent fellow who had stayed in the vicinity of Caversham. We would sometimes meet for dinner at a hotel on the high street, and on one such evening found ourselves conversing in a jolly way with the young woman who served at the table. Her name was Amy, a pretty, dark-haired creature of about one-and-twenty whose ready laugh fell most engagingly on the ear. I recall she gave us drinks on the house.

  Later, I walked her home, and she told me a little of her history – she was born and raised in Stamford, Lincolnshire, and had come here two years earlier after a certain Mr Fenton had offered to secure her a position as governess. But the man kept prevaricating, and the arrangement was continually delayed. Needing to pay her rent, she had taken a series of menial jobs to tide her over, thus accounting for her present employment at the hotel. By the time we had bidden each other goodnight at her door I was – you have guessed it – helplessly besotted. Perhaps it is the fate of someone unaccustomed to warmth that he will grab too precipitately at the merest wisp of human affection. I was that susceptible.

  I began to seek out Amy’s company to the exclusion of all else. She in turn seemed happy to be sought after, and we spent an occasional day out wandering over fields and stiles. It was perfectly chaste, I should say; it did not occur to me to play any role but that of attentive swain. Yet I soon noticed in her manner a hesitancy, and a sudden inclination to fearfulness that provoked my concern. Time and again I asked her to tell me what the matter was, but she refused. Finally, after an absence of some weeks, she reappeared at the hotel, with a bruise down the side of her face. Even I was not so naive as to swallow her explanation of it as an accident. This time I insisted that she tell me the truth, and, amidst a flood of tears, out it poured. It transpired that the man Fenton was a creditor of her mother’s – a widow – and had some hold upon her daughter in consequence. In return for clandestine ‘favours’ from Amy – here the story took a sinister turn – Fenton would write off a portion of the family’s debt. Amy had decided to comply with this transaction until such a time as the slate had been wiped clean. But Fenton by now had become unwilling to relinquish her, and, instead of using debt as his leverage, he threatened to ruin her if she dared to break from him. Lately she had tried to end the repulsive arrangement by fleeing to London. The attempt was doomed: she had no friends there, and no money to enable her to disappear. The bruise on her face was Fenton’s warning against her trying such a flit again.

  A heart of stone would have been pierced to hear this. My own heart, infinitely more permeable, was moved to outrage. I promised there and then to do everything in my power to help her. She smiled at that, and joked, in a broken way, that she was fortunate to have such a knight errant. But how would she ever escape this blackmailer? The tears she had managed to hold back came once more. I could not bear to see her in distress, and resolved upon a scheme. What if – what if I were to find a means of spiriting her away from the town to some place of refuge? He would track me down, she replied. In other words, she was trapped here.

  I brooded on this for a few days, trying to devise a plan. The friend in whose company I had first met Amy was a Scotsman named Robert, whose advice I believed I could depend on. One night I went to his lodgings and told him the whole story, of Amy’s plight, and of my determination to rescue her. He looked very dubious about my intervening, though once he realised I was not to be dissuaded he agreed that the safest course would be to take her out of the country. But where? His first suggestion was Norway, a name that sounded rebarbative to my untutored ear – a dismal place full of elks and snow. Robert then got to talking of a holiday he had once enjoyed in the Low Countries, which chimed with my own imagining of them as an affable, accommodating territory. By chance he also knew of someone in Amsterdam who would be able to provide board and lodging. There was a steamer which ran from Harwich to the Netherlands . . . It could be done. It had to be done.

  A vertiginous excitement seized me as I contemplated this bold step, and before I could change my mind I sought Amy at the hotel. Her initial look of anxiety only spurred me on, and once I had explained to her where the Netherlands were she seemed to take courage. Perhaps she began to see it as I did; that is, romantically. She would be a fugitive, and I her protector. There remained, alas, a very obvious stumbling block. The cost of the ferry from Harwich for two would be – I knew not what – whilst food and lodging and other expenses had to be accounted for. Amy had no savings, not from the pittance she earned, and my own were negligible. Robert would lend me a little, though he was hardly in funds himself. That early surge of excitement was receding, and I felt for the first time what a desperate thing it was to need money. The obvious recourse I had was to apply to my father, who, I knew, would have come to my aid. But he would also have asked why I required such a large sum, and I did not have it in me to deceive him.

  When the moment demands, however, it is surprising to learn exactly what one is capable of. It had become clear that selling off possessions would not raise the necessary. A signet ring (given to me by my mother) extracted from the pawnbroker about a quarter of what I’d hoped. A few other oddments – silver, books, clothes – made a few pounds, but not nearly enough. I was coming close to despair when fate tossed me a solution. One day I was at work in the front shop of the printer’s offices, on my own and quite probably in a daydream of Amy. I heard a carriage halt on the street and a customer stepped briskly inside. He had come to settle an account, but since the manager was not present I told him I was authorised (which was true) to handle the transaction. The man, evidently in a hurry, nodded his acquiescence and handed over a stiff envelope, which I opened and counted out the banknotes. It came to £120, plus a few shillings. I wrote out a receipt, signed it, and the man went on his way.

  Ordinarily I would have put the envelope on the manager’s desk and thought nothing more of it. But now the finger of opportunism was prodding me. The banknotes were in my charge, and, with drumming heart, I saw in an instant how I should take advantage. Nobody else was in the shop. I peeled off two £10 notes and hid them in my pocket. Opening the till – it was sometimes my job to count the day’s takings – I placed the remaining hundred or so therein, thus hiding the deficit in the pool of cash already accumulated. I burnt the envelope in which the customer had presented his payment, thus creating an excuse for locking the money in the till: when, later that day, the manager asked me why I hadn’t put it on his desk, I explained – in a responsible tone – that I thought it best not leave so much cash lying about unguarded. Whoever did the ‘totting up’ that evening reported no discrepancy. Back in my rooms I stared at the pair of banknotes; our escape fund had tripled at a stroke.

  The ease with which I had managed it emboldened me. Individual sums of money passing through the business were not often as large as that day’s, but the accounting was sufficiently lax for someone of reasonable cunning to skim a little off the top. A pound here, a pound there, it mounted up. Sometimes, a sudden look or hesitation on the part of an office senior had convinced me that the jig was up, and I braced myself for the unmasking. But it never came. Having concealed what I had been do
ing from Amy, one night I finally broke under the nervous thrill and confessed my descent into larceny. She was shocked, of course, and urged me to stop – that is, until I showed her how much I had already pilfered. I promised I would help you escape, I said. Here is how. We spoke in low voices, looking at the hoard of notes and coins emptied across my bed, where Amy, bright-eyed, now flopped, and pulled me on top of her . . . If I had once scrupled to continue this reckless plan, after that night I never did so again.

  With money in promising accumulation we decided upon the date of our removal, a week hence. By this time I had seen the blackmailer Fenton at the hotel – a younger-looking man than I had imagined – and though we never spoke I had no difficulty in tracing knavery in his very profile. It was agony to watch Amy behave so equably towards him in the hotel’s taproom, but we had agreed that her manner should remain absolutely unchanged, lest his suspicions be aroused. The day I purchased our ferry passage from Harwich to Rotterdam was the first time Amy briefly lost heart: she had been in Fenton’s thrall for so long that the reality of deliverance suddenly overwhelmed her. But I was quick to assuage these fears, showing her the little store of cash that would enable our escape. As she stared at it, I saw an eagerness for the plan rekindle in her eyes. We clasped hands, and swore to hold our nerve.

  The day arrived, a working day like any other, except that we both knew it to be the last ever of our residence in Caversham, and perhaps in England, too. I had given Amy the key to my rooms, where she would change in undisturbed preparation for our journey. I would join her immediately on leaving the printer’s, where they were still blessedly unaware of the thief in their midst. All day I watched the clock’s hands snailing around their circuit, each minute seeming to last an hour – the bastinado could not have been a more exquisite torture. Five o’clock finally came around (relief!) and with feigned nonchalance I took the day’s takings from the till into the back room to be counted. I knew immediately that something was afoot on meeting there the firm’s wizened accountant who, to my knowledge, had never been spotted anywhere outside of his tumbledown office on the floor above. My employer, Mr Flegg, stood next to him, and another gentleman I had not seen before. He turned out to be the arresting police officer. Though they found nothing in my pockets – ironically, it was one of the few days I had kept my hand out of the till – Flegg’s accountant had already accumulated sufficient evidence to damn me. But why had they chosen this of all days to pounce?