The Streets Read online

  I considered this for a moment, and answered him, ‘Not at all.’

  The decisiveness of my tone surprised him, for hitherto I must have seemed to him diffident, and probably ignorant. At that moment a knock sounded at the door and a servant put her head round the jamb.

  ‘Sir, Mrs Marchmont asked if you would bid the children goodnight before you go.’

  ‘Indeed I will!’ he cried, and hoisted himself from his chair. ‘See that the carriage is brought round, Dawkins. Arlington Street.’ He was suddenly all business, locking his desk, re-stoppering the sherry decanter, tucking a cigar case into his pocket, and muttering in a distracted way to Rennert. It seemed that I had been momentarily forgotten about, for his only concern was to find the store of ‘blunt’ he had secreted, and he indulged a good deal of head-scratching and pocket-patting over its whereabouts. (I deduced from this that blunt was a slang word for money.) When Rennert blithely pulled open the lower drawer of his own desk and produced a sheaf of banknotes, Marchmont almost shouted his delight.

  ‘Baccarat night, you see,’ he said with a wink, splaying the notes into a fan. ‘And these fellows are sticklers for ready money – you can’t write ’em a cheque!’

  I tagged along behind as they sauntered out of the office and into the hallway. Marchmont, not one for ceremony, shook my hand and bounded up the stairs, evidently keen to have done with his paternal duties and make haste to his card night. I was left once more in the company of Rennert, who, opening the door and blowing his cheeks at the cold, turned another of his beady looks on me.

  ‘This is no night to be without an overcoat.’ I nodded agreement, and made a comical grimace. He continued to stare at me. ‘Do you have an overcoat?’

  I admitted that I did not, and his expression mingled pity with the smallest flicker of exasperation. ‘You collected your pay at the office this evening?’

  ‘I was informed that payments would be delayed – registration and so forth . . .’

  He nodded, and said, ‘Should you manage not to take chill and die over the weekend, come to my office first thing on Monday morning.’

  I thanked him, though I didn’t know what for, and stood on the step ready to leave. But something came back to me at that moment, and I said, ‘One other thing, sir. A phrase Mr Marchmont used this evening, just as those two other gentlemen were leaving his office – something about “do as my shirt does”. I have heard this before. What does it mean?’ I remembered the explosive laughter it had provoked, and now I saw in Rennert’s pale eyes a sardonic gleam that was perhaps the nearest this sombre man ever came to amusement.

  ‘Just a phrase the governor has picked up on his travels,’ he said, then dropped his voice confidentially. ‘It means – “kiss my arse”.’

  I walked back east under the glimmering lamplight of the Marylebone Road. At King’s Cross I saw an omnibus that would have carried me up to Islington, where I had my lodgings. But I reasoned that the tuppence I spent on the fare would be better saved for a bite to eat over the weekend. What I had omitted to tell Rennert was that my coat had been stolen in the Brill, and my purse with it. The story of its theft betrayed such arrant naivety on my part that I could not yet bring myself to confess it. Two days previously in Somers Town I had been footsore from tramping the streets and had chanced to rest in a tavern near the market. It was a low sort of place, crowded – so are they all in this vicinity – but I found a corner where I might eat my mutton pie in relative seclusion. I also took a pewter of ale, and soon, warmed by the fire, I loosened my collar and took off my coat. My error was to go outside to the privy, for when I returned the chair where I had hung it was bare. I looked about the room, at the costers and the pipe smokers and the stallholders, all in murmurous chat and none of them so much as glancing at me. I might as well have not been there, like my coat, which actually wasn’t.

  I approached the potman at the bar, who continued polishing a glass as I told him of this unaccountable disappearance. He listened politely, then tweaked his mouth to acknowledge the pity of my situation – no money, no coat – but he had nothing to offer beyond, ‘Can’t help yer, son. Lot o’ lifters round ’ere.’ Perhaps, I pursued, someone had witnessed this ‘lifter’ in the act, at which he gestured at the indifferent mass of drinkers crowding the room, as if to say, You ask them. I felt so aggrieved at this moment that I took his leave to do just that, and, swallowing, raised my voice to nobody in particular. ‘My coat and money are gone. Did anybody happen to see the thief?’ A few of the tavern’s customers looked around, and I sensed that they did not much care for a stranger bandying the word ‘thief’ amongst them. It had the ring of an unwarranted accusation. Into this silence I repeated, less firmly, ‘Anybody?’ I heard someone make a kind of hissing noise in reproach, and then a muttered voice: ‘Dunno about no coat, but ’e can do as my shirt does.’ My burning ears still heard laughter as the tavern door swung behind me.

  And now, two days later, I knew the meaning of that delightful phrase.

  Nice as nip

  FLEET STREET WAS a rattling pandemonium of carts and carriages and omnibuses that I had to dodge on my way to Salisbury Square, a tiny cobblestoned enclosure where the editorial offices of Marchmont’s serial occupied the upper part of the building once owned by the Chronicle newspaper. It faced directly onto St Bride’s Church. The Labouring Classes of London was at that time one of the most successful weeklies in the country, and people trooped up and down those stairs at all times of the day and late into the night. As well as Marchmont’s staff of copy boys, subeditors, stenographers, typesetters and illustrators, you would see a less regular (though generally more vociferous) train of cabmen, labourers, street vendors and ruffian-types passing through, at the guvnor’s invitation, to tell their stories personally. Marchmont, always under the pressure of deadlines, would then redictate this material, with embellishments of his own, to a shorthand writer. It made for a somewhat chaotic workplace, since the bevy of ‘bona fide’ contributors from the street was not easily distinguished from that class of chancers who preyed on the paper’s open-door arrangement. Thefts were not infrequent.

  The office routine was supervised by the imperturbable Rennert, who would meet with his staff of inspectors (as we were called) on the Monday morning to explain that week’s theme or subject – it might be ‘the costermongers’ diet’, or ‘children street sellers’, or ‘Sunday-morning markets’ – and to distribute the ‘dailies’, for expenses that would be incurred whilst on the streets. Marchmont would usually be in his office, either writing or interviewing, and seldom emerged before five o’clock. But not today. He was in the main office when I arrived, yarning away to a little coven of his writers – I soon came to learn he liked nothing better than to be attended, like a king amongst his courtiers. Around him the office began to find its industrious rhythm, which would gather in energy as Friday loomed, the day the paper went to press.

  Whilst he was occupied with entertaining his staff, Rennert summoned me to his own office that fronted onto Fleet Street: I could hear the racket of the thoroughfare below us. Rennert had taken from his desk a small metal box, which he unlocked, and proceeded to examine its contents. Without looking up, he said, ‘Would it be correct to assume that you are presently – short of funds?’

  I replied in the affirmative, and he fished out five sovereigns.

  ‘This is an advance on three weeks’ wages, with a little extra. Your rent is how much?’

  ‘Seven shillings a week.’

  ‘I advise you to open a bank account,’ he said, and then wrote something on a piece of paper which he handed to me. ‘Keep back thirty shillings to pay for an overcoat – go to this fellow.’ He had written the name of a tailor, and his address. I thanked him, put the money in my pocket and turned to leave. ‘Wait,’ he said sharply. ‘The governor will accompany you today. He knows Somers Town well – you should learn from him. When you make notes, write in pencil. Your reports are of no use if your hand is illegib
le.’ He said all this in a clipped, businesslike way, as he might have done with any of his minions. But then he looked at me squarely, and there was something changed in his tone when he spoke. ‘Do you like to gamble, Mr Wildeblood?’

  ‘No,’ I said, recalling then the story of the ‘three-up’ I had told on Friday evening. ‘That is – not very often.’

  He nodded, I think in approval; then he said something that greatly surprised me. ‘Don’t tell him you’re carrying this money.’ I was confounded for a moment – the identity of ‘him’ was plain – but the look in Rennert’s pale eyes warned me not to ask his meaning. He bid me good day, and I went back into the main office, where Marchmont was still volubly enthralled by one of his own monologues. Some minutes later, having reached a rare pause, he spotted me loitering in the vestibule, and bidding his audience farewell he ambled over with that curious swaggering gait of his – he didn’t walk so much as roll. He shrugged on his coat, with its huge fur collar, and a hat, and we proceeded down the stairs and out into the street. I asked him if we should take an omnibus, but he dismissed the idea with an impatient wave.

  ‘The best means of discovering this city is to walk it,’ he said, then happened to look round at me. ‘What, no coat?’ The day was murderously raw.

  ‘I mislaid it last week. Mr Rennert has advised me as to where I might purchase another.’ I took out the slip of paper with the tailor’s details and showed it to him. He exclaimed on reading it.

  ‘Regent Street!? Great heavens, does he imagine you’re made of money?’

  ‘He advanced me a loan on my wages,’ I replied, and then wished I hadn’t, as he gave me a slyly appraising look.

  ‘I know where you might lay hands on a coat, and save yourself a few shillings.’

  We continued in the direction of the Strand, with Marchmont’s voice in my ear the whole time, then turned into the warren of narrow courts and alleys approaching Holborn. They were close-packed, mean-looking habitations around here, but Marchmont walked seemingly without fear. When he stopped to chat to a street seller or a char as she washed the steps, he did not for a moment talk down to them, but nor did he try to ingratiate himself by pretending to be an equal: his top hat and watch chain announced his station in life. I suppose his manner was one of convivial aloofness. His pace, leisurely up to now, became brisk as we reached one thoroughfare – I think it was Shelton Street – and he said, in an undertone, ‘We need not linger around these parts.’ It seemed that even the guvnor put limits on his own amiability. Once out of Drury Lane the very air seemed cleaner, the streets wider, and we took the squares to the north – Bloomsbury, Russell, Tavistock – in our stride.

  He must have noticed me shivering, because once we crossed the Euston Road into Somers Town he made a beeline for a little shop selling second-hand apparel on Ossulston Street. I say ‘little’; behind its narrow frontage lay a cavernous interior whose walls were lined with dishevelled rows of coats and jackets in all cuts and colours. It was a dingy sort of refuge, a waiting room of worn old clobber from which rose the astonishing smell (I would hazard) of all the bodies that had once inhabited these dismal garments. I looked at Marchmont, expecting him to remark on the ripe medley of odours, but he was already at the racks, holding the sleeve of a coat and rubbing its cloth between his stubby fingers.

  A diminutive trader, appearing from behind a curtain, had sidled over, eyes darting busily behind his spectacles. Around his pate hanks of oily unkempt hair straggled from the back of his head to his collar, which did not look quite clean. Beneath his jacket he wore a waistcoat of flaming scarlet-and-green tartan.

  ‘Morning, sirs,’ he said. ‘And what may I do for you?’

  ‘This young feller requires a coat,’ said Marchmont, still absorbed in his examination. The man took a cursory measurement of my chest with his grubby tailor’s measure.

  ‘Well, we does all sorts, sir – dress coats, Ulster coats, great coats, frock coats, pea coats, bob-tailed coats, pilot coats, and overcoats of a h’aristocratic style, though there’s no great call for ’em nowadays,’ he added, with a faint note of regret. He fixed a narrow-eyed look on me. ‘I fancy you might suit summin’ like this . . .’ and he pulled from the rack a grand black frock coat with wide peaked lapels. He held it for me to shrug on and gave a little brush to the shoulders.

  Marchmont at last deigned to cast his eye over the garment. ‘It’s a tidy fit,’ he said, ‘and decent cloth, too.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nice as nip, sir, better than what they does you in the slop trade – far better.’ And he gave another little stroke to the material, as if it were the coat of a favourite dog. I rather admired it myself, until I happened to notice on the revers of the left sleeve a curious brownish stain, about the size of a wax seal. I felt a sudden inward recoil.

  ‘What’s this?’

  The clothes dealer peered at it. ‘Looks like dried blood. P’raps a butcher once worn it.’ He appeared quite unconcerned by this possibility. I looked to Marchmont, who also took a neutral view of the stain.

  ‘More likely a surgeon’s,’ he said, ‘given the cloth’s quality.’

  This last word roused the dealer to enthusiasm. ‘Oh, I’m glad you sees the quality, sir. Not many customers is very perticler about quality – they just comes ’ere for a bargain.’

  But by now I was unbuttoning the coat – I couldn’t get the thing off my back quickly enough. Blood!? Marchmont, his eyebrows raised in surprise, stared at me.

  ‘I can’t wear that. I’m sorry,’ I said, with enough conviction in my voice to forestall any argument. The dealer looked baffled by my rejection. Marchmont only said, ‘It seems you have a customer more perticler than most.’

  I turned to the man. ‘You said that you had pilot coats . . .’ I did not know a pilot coat from a pilot fish, but I liked the sound of this raiment. The man went back to the racks and plucked out a double-breasted jacket with wooden buttons in dark blue serge, less fine than the frock coat, but free of incriminating stains. It was shortish in length, but the collar could be pulled up to protect your ears from the cold, and there were slash pockets at each side to warm the hands. I looked at myself in the brown-spotted glass of a cheval mirror, and thought the coat looked well. Marchmont’s reflection joined mine – he seemed somehow diminished in the glass.

  ‘You have the look of someone about to run off to sea,’ he said archly.

  ‘I had an uncle who was a sailor,’ I replied. ‘I believe I met him once.’ And I knew that his ship had gone down with all hands somewhere on the way to Guatemala, in the 1860s.

  The man had sniffed a sale. ‘In good condition, too. Worth twelve shillin’s of anyone’s money.’

  I nodded, thinking that reasonable, but Marchmont gave a theatrical sigh. ‘I’m sure you can do better than that,’ he said.

  The man gave a defensive shrug. ‘Twelve is about the card for a good thing like this, sir. You said y’self, you pays for quality.’

  ‘Not quite what I said,’ replied Marchmont drily, and for the next minute or so the two of them haggled over what might be a fair price. The man insisted he could not go lower than ten, but Marchmont with casual tenacity knocked him down to eight. So I had my coat, and had spared myself a few bob into the bargain. Or so I thought then.

  For the rest of the morning Marchmont conducted me on a perambulation of Somers Town, which district, I learned, he had known intimately from his youth. He had once lived at Seymour Street, he said, in the days when the place still clung to its fading cloak of respectability. Before that, at the end of the last century, it had been home to a colony of ‘foreign artisans’, mostly from France, who sought refuge from the Reign of Terror. Whilst the wealthier sort of émigrés settled to the west, around the streets and squares of Marylebone, exiles of the poorer class found their way to St Pancras and Somers Town, where they soon established a genteel industry – of silversmiths, tailors, carpenters – to rival Clerkenwell and Spitalfields. Looking about the shabby terraces
now, at the swarming streets and the rowdy taverns, it did not seem (I could not help remarking) so genteel any longer.

  ‘On the irrational market of social reputation a place may rise and fall quickly,’ said Marchmont. ‘It is the way of the city. Somers Town started out as pastoral land, with its fields and flower gardens, and as money circulated it became prosperous. Streets of grand houses spread over the wild common. But then money left – who knows why? – and those houses were sold off for less than they cost to build. The neighbourhood became seedy and cheap. Another wave of immigrants poured in – the Irish notably – and the family terraces were broken up into rooms for rent. My boyhood home is now a dosshouse with beds for fourpence a night.’

  I stole a glance at him then, but his expression was opaque. ‘The change does not . . . trouble you?’ I said.

  He tweaked his mouth slightly. ‘Well, I was lucky. I got out.’ The reply seemed to satisfy him. We walked on, and he continued to reminisce. ‘The Brill market, which you already know, used to be twice the size in my day, before the railway came.’ At this, he pointed yonder to the spires and smoke stacks of St Pancras, the grand station erected about ten years before. It had necessitated a vast clearance of slums.

  ‘So that has improved the district’s character,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘A little. But clearing slums solves only half of the problem. The poor still need to be housed. Some were dispersed north to Camden, Kentish Town and beyond, but you still have many railway workers, itinerants and so on. Thus the modern scourge of overcrowding.’ He looked thoughtful then, and seemed about to enlarge on this theme. But instead he asked me whether I had done any ‘house-to-house’ yet. I shook my head. ‘Then perhaps we should begin.’

  This was the part of the job I had been dreading. Hitherto I had walked the streets engaging in conversation with local tradesmen and costers and whoever else happened to be abroad that day, such as any curious visitor might do in a place unfamiliar to him. But whereas the streets were the common property of all, to go knocking at people’s doors and seeking entry into their homes was surely an imposition on them, especially if one had no pretext other than ‘scientific enquiry’. My brief experience of the neighbourhood (I still heard the mocking laughter of that crowded tavern) indicated that the locals did not much care for strangers. I confessed this misgiving to Marchmont, who seemed amused by such nicety of feeling.