The Streets Page 9

  ‘Well, on the matter of rents,’ I replied, ‘I have something that may interest you.’ I fished out of my breast pocket a folded piece of paper and pushed it across the table towards him. He looked at this offering suspiciously, but took out his spectacles anyway and proceeded to unfold it for perusal. I added brightly, ‘I should think the meeting will be greatly intrigued by your views.’

  As he read the contents Abernathy’s face stiffened with disdain. He looked up at me and, without speaking, handed on the piece of paper for Lobbett to read. The latter ran his eye across it, and coloured furiously. ‘“Pay no rent”,’ he quoted with a snort. ‘I might have known you were in league with that rabble. This is insupportable. Sir, may I ask – what are you doing at this table?’

  ‘The same thing you’re doing,’ I said, holding up a morsel of salmon on my fork. ‘Grateful to be eating food of a quality and abundance that most people could scarcely conceive of. And enjoying company that’s convivial –’ I now looked from Abernathy to Lobbett – ‘in the main.’

  At that Lobbett snatched up his napkin and made to rise, but his movement of protest was stifled by a voice from the head of the table. Sir Martin, as if intuiting a potential outbreak of unpleasantness, boomed in Kitty’s direction: ‘Enjoying the salmon, my dear?’

  ‘Yes I am, Papa,’ she called back.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind that it’s served with the head.’

  Kitty glanced down at the cloudy-eyed fish, then smiled at her father. ‘No, not really – so long as they don’t serve the chicken that way.’

  Sir Martin laughed loudly, and one by one everyone else did. The gathering tension suddenly dissolved, though for the remainder of dinner neither Abernathy nor Lobbett deigned to talk to me. Mrs Abernathy, caught amidships between a disobliging stranger and an offended husband, kept her conversation to a purse-lipped minimum. It did not trouble me. Kitty, oblivious to the chill from across the table, beguiled the time with merry accounts of her horse riding and theatregoing whilst yet more courses came and went. That she was heiress to the vast wealth around us did not appear to have affected her at all; there was no condescension or haughtiness in her manner. We chatted away as though we had known one another for years, and I liked her for it.

  I had stopped eating by the time the second pudding was served (‘Mm, chartreuse de fraises!’ crooned Kitty), and feeling my stomach roil and swell at the unaccustomed volume it had to accommodate I was reminded of another of Jo’s phrases. He often talked of dinner as ‘doing the tightner’, and I was about to relay this titbit to Kitty for her amusement when Sir Martin’s major-domo hurried in and whispered agitatedly in the ear of his master. Sir Martin’s saturnine expression did not change as he nodded to the man, rose from the table and walked to the end of the room, where he threw open the double doors overlooking the back garden. He took a step out onto the terrace before seeming to recall his responsibility as host.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen – my apologies,’ he said. ‘I have been informed that an intruder has been sighted in the garden.’ A quavering murmur of shock escaped one or two of the ladies present, and Sir Martin held forth his palms in a mollifying gesture. ‘There is no cause for alarm. My staff are dealing with the matter.’ But whether he trusted them to do so was uncertain, for he once again stepped out into the night. His guests, glancing at one another in confusion, looked momentarily stunned. What was the etiquette for such an occasion? After a few moments, two men rose at the far end of the table and disappeared after Sir Martin; others began to follow their lead, and, prompted by curiosity more than obligation, I also stood and headed for the open doors.

  Out on the flagged terrace the night was still, and the expansive garden, a few steps below us, was steeped in shadows. Sir Martin was in urgent converse with one of his staff – a gardener, it seemed – whilst those guests who had boldly poured out now hung back, unsure of what they were supposed to do. ‘Outrageous – the damnable nerve of it!’ I heard someone mutter behind me, and someone else mentioned a recent newspaper report of housebreaking in the area. The light from the dining room carried only so far onto the lawn, beyond which all was a moonless black. This was suddenly illumined when, from the room above us, an auxiliary bank of gaslight flooded down; it revealed to us a pair of servants who had been poking around in the bushes and, beyond them, an untidy heap of rags underneath one of the elms. ‘What’s that?’ a voice asked. It was too far away to tell, until, without warning, the heap began to rise, provoking a small ‘oh’ of fright from a lady beside me. The rags had weirdly resolved themselves into a hag-like figure which had, it seemed, been crouching within the dark. Now its – his – hiding place had been exposed, and he was on the move, though not very quickly. He carried a sack on his shoulder.

  ‘Over there!’ someone cried, and as the figure scuttled behind the trees Sir Martin and several of his dinner guests set off in pursuit. One of them was holding a storm lantern.

  I found Kitty at my side. ‘He must have climbed the wall at the back,’ she said. ‘They come in from the park.’

  ‘“They”?’

  She shrugged. ‘Housebreakers, I suppose. The wretch is for it if Papa gets his hands on him.’

  More of the men were descending from the terrace onto the lawn, scenting drama in the air. One fellow, sweating and puce-faced from drink, had thrown off his coat and was leading a group in the direction of the trees. He bellowed back to his companions, ‘Let’s chase the rogue down!’ and someone mimicked the parp of a hunting horn, to much laughter. I too stepped down to the lawn, velvety under foot, and began following the impromptu posse of stalking males. In the distance I could see Sir Martin’s advance party fanning out in a line. I didn’t give much for the trespasser’s chances with this pack on his heels. All that had saved him from capture so far was the poor visibility; the swinging lantern was not luminous enough to scatter the black-blue shadows. Its narrow blade of light must have made a lucky stab, however, because a cry suddenly went up, ‘That’s him!’ – and a figure, silhouetted against the bushes, was moving, in a laboured, half-crouching run, towards a passage at the corner of the house from where I presumed he had come. Another gardener stepped in the way of the fleeing man, and both fell in a heap.

  Whatever pain the intruder had felt was immediately compounded by a savage kick to his gut from the beefy, red-faced fellow who had discarded his jacket. ‘That’ll serve you, you filthy beggar!’ he cried. The leaders of the hunt party closed in on the scene, Sir Martin foremost amongst them, his face eerily lit by the lantern.

  ‘That’s enough, Douglas,’ he said sharply to the aggressor, who had just delivered another kick to his quarry. Crumpled on the ground, the man was revealed under capture as more pitiful than menacing. He was perhaps fifty, a low, shrunken-looking character whose clothes were patched and worn; his demeanour was that of a derelict, not a housebreaker, and it seemed to have punctured the giddy mood of excitement. What was he doing here? Sir Martin was addressing the same question to him, and received a muttered reply.

  ‘Speak up, now. How did you get in here?’

  The man, breathing heavily, raised his head and pointed to the door he had been making for: the tradesmen’s entrance. As his face turned to the light I felt a jolt of recognition. It took me a moment to realise that it was the fellow I had seen outside with his boy some hours earlier, shovelling horse dung on the road. Someone had picked up the man’s burlap sack and handed it to Sir Martin, though from its shape it hardly seemed capacious enough for swag. Sir Martin opened the sack and peered into it – then jerked back, his nose wrinkling in distaste. Without quite knowing why I stepped forward and asked to examine it for myself. The bag was light, and its contents gave off a bitter, stale whiff of tobacco.

  I turned to Sir Martin. ‘Sir, this fellow is no thief – he works on the streets. I saw him as I arrived at your door this evening.’

  ‘Then what the deuce is he doing in my garden?’

  I dipped into the b
ag and held its miserable contents in my palm for inspection. ‘Cigar ends. That is all he has in here. He collects cigar ends off the ground.’

  ‘What?’ said Sir Martin, frowning his disbelief.

  ‘There is a trade for it. I have seen them working in other affluent quarters of town – anywhere cigars are smoked. When they have gathered a sufficiency of ends they sell them on to the large manufacturers. Who then reconstitute them.’

  ‘And they make a living from this?’

  ‘I think so – in part. This fellow was also collecting horse dung along the road, with a boy.’

  At this the wretch, prostrate on the ground, spoke up. ‘That’s roight, sor. I make an honest livin’. An’ he’s a good boy, sor.’ He was addressing me, as the only person present, I suppose, who would vouch for his innocence.

  ‘Where is the boy?’ I asked.

  ‘Just by the gate, sor,’ he said. ‘Me son. We makes an honest livin’.’

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ I said. Honest it surely was, though how much refuse he would have to gather to make a ‘living’ I could not begin to say.

  By now the house was ablaze with lights, and those who had not ventured outside had their faces pressed to the windows. The tradesmen’s door at the side had creaked open, and through it emerged two slops – policemen, I should say – escorting the Irishman’s lad between them. The circle that had formed around our trespasser opened to admit these new arrivals.

  ‘Found ’im ’iding in the bushes outside, sir,’ said the constable, tipping his helmet. ‘Sez as his old man told him to wait there.’

  The boy was about ten, pale, scrawny, with an angry port wine stain running from his right cheek to his neck. What bad luck, I thought, to have that on top of all his other disadvantages. He hurried to his father, who, standing, clasped him to his side. Sir Martin, pinching his brow, looked like a man who would have preferred somebody else to resolve the situation, which was now a domestic inconvenience rather than the villainy everyone had supposed. He turned to the onlookers. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, please, let us return to the dining room. Our chef, I gather, has prepared more sweetmeats to delight us.’ There followed a melting away of the guests back towards the illuminated house and the mouth-watering prospect of a gossip about the evening’s drama. M. Charbonnier’s sweetmeats would be the garnish.

  I too was withdrawing when Sir Martin called me back. He was standing a little apart from the policemen and the forlorn pair of father and son.

  ‘Thank you for your . . .’ He wasn’t sure what service I had done him, and nor was I. He had plucked from his waistcoat pocket a sovereign, and for a horrifying moment I thought he was about to tip me. ‘I have told the constable I will not press charges. He will be released . . . with a warning.’ He nodded to himself, perhaps impressed by his own forbearance, then handed me the coin. ‘Give this to the fellow, and send him on his way.’

  It was generous: a sovereign was probably more than this man earned in a month. But that he had endured such humiliation to gain it disturbed me. I followed the policemen along the narrow passageway and out towards the front of the house. The man was still holding the boy’s hand. Our crunching footsteps on the gravel finally took us to the entrance, with the pair of stone eagles on guard atop the gate-piers. I waited whilst one of the constables gave the man a short finger-wagging lecture before they moved on. Beneath one of the road’s tall gas lamps a cart stood; the man had left it there, I presumed, whilst he made his hopeful expedition into this Eden of choice cigar ends. He now took a step towards me, and made a humble bow. ‘God bless you, sor,’ he said.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I took his hand and put the sovereign in it. He looked at the coin in his palm, and then looked at me. His expression was one of utter confusion, and I thought I knew why. Convinced that I had saved him during the melee in Sir Martin’s garden, he was now at a loss as to why I should be giving him money. The man who he imagined had been his protector suddenly stood revealed as an impersonal dispenser of charity. Our brief relationship had been reduced to hard cash. I experienced an odd bristling of shame – though of course the fellow took the sovereign, and with a distracted nod, he and his blush-faced boy collected their cart and tramped off into the night.

  Back inside the house I was crossing the hall when the ginger-haired man I had noticed earlier at dinner appeared from round the corner. I was going to walk on without a glance, and expected him to do the same, but as I approached he slowed and caught my eye. Politeness required me to halt, though I felt no great inclination to speak to him. He gave his name as Montgomery Sprule, and introduced himself as a ‘social scientist’.

  ‘You have perhaps heard of my book The Inferior Race?’

  I confessed I had not, but he seemed unfazed by that.

  ‘I could not help overhearing your discussion at dinner,’ he continued in a lofty but not unfriendly tone. Up close his eyes gleamed an Arctic blue. ‘And behold, we have seen your deserving poor man, saved from arrest!’

  ‘I think he deserved rather more than that. As he said, he earned an honest living.’

  ‘Ye-e-es,’ he drawled, ‘but I wonder how long the man can subsist on work as meagre as his, with a family to feed. I mean, cigar ends?! You must see how poverty has degraded him.’

  ‘Certainly I do – which is why it behoves us to campaign for better working conditions, fair pay, fair rents. Poverty must be a collective responsibility, not an individual one.’

  ‘On that point we are entirely agreed. But your treatment is impractical.’

  ‘Oh. And what would you propose?’

  His tone became more confiding. ‘We must regulate the existence of the chronic poor – by complete segregation. No, I don’t mean the workhouse – I heard what you said to Abernathy and the other fellow. That is only a temporary solution to a permanent problem. I mean we must create entire settlements, away from the city and its temptations, perhaps on the coast, or on some moorland. A healthy environment, no strong drink but plenty of fresh air, where there would be appropriate employment and rational recreation.’

  I looked at him, and for a moment I wondered if he was joking. ‘I don’t see how such a scheme could work.’

  Sprule raised an indulgent finger. ‘Ah, but it would work. The families of the poor will be trained each day in self-sufficiency. They will build their own homes, farm their own food. And in helping themselves they would become servants of the state. So the whole country benefits.’

  ‘You overlook something, Mr Sprule. What if they – the poor – don’t want to leave their homes?’

  ‘If we show them the advantages of these resettlements we believe they will be persuaded to go. Why would they wish to continue in the desolation and squalor of an urban slum?’

  ‘You say “we” . . .?’

  He opened his hands expansively. ‘A committee of like-minded professionals who have a concern about the future of society,’ he replied. ‘Criminal theorists, medical men, social investigators, and so on. I wondered if you might care to put your name down, given your evident interest in the question.’

  ‘Thank you for the offer. But no – it seems to me you could only manage such a scheme by compulsion. And I believe a man must be free to choose where he lives.’

  Sprule pulled a face to suggest his ambivalence on that particular principle. ‘As you wish. Though I should tell you that Mr Marchmont has given us his backing. Perhaps he would put the matter more persuasively than I can.’

  ‘There you are!’ cried Kitty, bounding up to me. ‘I thought we’d lost you for the evening.’ Her interruption was timely, for it covered my surprise and bafflement on hearing Sprule’s mention of Marchmont as one of his allies. This resettlement project hardly squared with what I knew of the guvnor’s avowed belief in laissez-faire. I had managed an awkward bow in taking my leave of Sprule, but I felt his still, measuring gaze on me as Kitty, arm linked companionably in mine, led us back to the dining room, and the inexhaustible bounty of
Sir Martin’s table.

  Pay No Rent

  THE SCANDAL OF the rents was already blazoned on the bricks and mortar of Somers Town, and the worst of the tumbledown houses belonging to Moyles now wore bill posters (NOTICE TO QUIT) across their windows, like a blindfold victim awaiting the executioner. Nobody knew when demolition would begin, but it seemed that the relief this would bring to the poorest tenants of the neighbourhood was not unanimously welcomed. I passed a dispiriting half-hour in conversation one morning with a woman who could not understand the benefits of the coming clearance. Mrs Nicholls and her two young children lived on Barclay Street in a single first-floor room afflicted with damp, rot and loose windows. Her husband had died of tuberculosis a year earlier, and it was only on account of the parish that she had been able to make up the week’s rent. The broken note of doubt in her voice as she talked of vacating Barclay Street pierced me.

  ‘I mean . . . we’ve lived ’ere such a long time. Why’s they movin’ us out?’

  I could have said, plainly, that her room was not fit for human habitation, but I realised the offence this might give. ‘Well, the houses hereabouts aren’t always safe to live in. They must either be repaired or pulled down.’

  She squinted gloomily into the distance. Her face was quite comely, though hardship had weathered it. I estimated she was about forty. ‘I wish they’d just leave us be. We don’t wanna go to the work’us.’

  ‘You won’t have to go to the workhouse, Mrs Nicholls. Once the vestry pull down these houses they’ll be obliged to settle you elsewhere.’ I wanted to give her reassurance, though in truth I was not absolutely certain of the vestry’s policy towards tenants made homeless by clearances. I trusted to municipal common sense that they would make provision.