The Rescue Man Page 9

  Obliged to converse politely with other worthies seated about us, I was unable to resume any intimate dialogue with E.R. until about midnight, when the evening was breaking up.

  ‘I have not said to you the half of what I should wish to have,’ I said to her. ‘Nor have I to you,’ she replied, in a voice that seemed to quiver with unspoken feeling. I took this as my cue, & suggested to her that if she happened to be walking on the beach at Blundell Sands on such an afternoon next week, she might meet there a fellow who would sincerely cherish the opportunity to deepen their acquaintance. She responded with a look that mingled hopefulness & apprehension, but her chance to reply was again snatched away by the circling throng. Will she come?

  19th March 1862

  The days have been interminable. Tomorrow is the afternoon appointed to meet. Never before have I so consciously felt my life to depend upon the affections of another person.

  20th March 1862

  I had decided to feign a sudden illness at work so as to ensure a day of liberty, but in truth there was no need for dissemblance – I really did feel as sick as a horse. I arrived at Blundell Sands at noon, & paced along the shore for an hour in a miserable effort to calm my inward flutter. Rain had threatened in the forenoon, but now a pale, watery sun floated on the horizon, & out of habit I sat down to sketch. I remembered how, as a boy, I would spend hours at a time simply staring & wondering at the sea, & later would produce sketches of the curious toppling motion of the waves. I have them still, thanks to my mother, most of them untidy scrawls – yet I look upon them, these untutored boyish efforts, with fondness. Thus was I occupied with my sketchbook when I spotted her tall, coltish figure in the distance, & thought of Odysseus meeting Nausicaa on the shoreline. Silently I prayed that, whatever else Providence had in store for me, I would not fail in this. She wore a dark brown cape with a matching bonnet. That she had escaped the attentions of her lady companion for a few hours was testament to her boldness as much as her ingenuity. We talked, rather skittishly at first, but soon were back in the old ways of last summer before our acquaintance was inexplicably curtailed. She said that she was aggrieved by her father’s precipitate removal of the family to Scotland, though it was by no means the first time they had been ruled by his caprice. It took no remarkable intelligence to predict the rest: during their sojourn she was introduced to a certain Scotch gentleman, with a vast estate in Inverness & prospects which would happily accord with her own standing as an heiress. Did she find the gentleman agreeable? I asked. Yes, she did. And did he take leave to ask for her hand? Yes, he did – & was refused. Naturally this show of independent mettle riled her father, whose will was not accustomed to even the mildest opposition. So why did she resist him? ‘Because I wanted to marry a man whom I love, & who loves me,’ she said simply, her eyes searching mine. This was my cue – & yet my courage failed me! I could only circle around the question, & asked – Was she not afraid of exciting her father’s displeasure? She saw my feeble delay for what it was, & spoke more truly than I had dared: ‘I am afraid of nothing but the possibility of passing our lives apart.’

  I have these words by heart.

  7th April 1862

  A dinner at home to celebrate our betrothal. Ma, in fluttering exultation, thanks Emily for ‘agreeing to marry our son’ – as if I were some inconvenient loafer to be taken off their hands – though later in the evening she is reduced to plaintive sobs on learning that the married couple will not be living with her at Abercromby-square. Georgy & Cassie rather shy around the lady, but melted upon seeing her play the piano. Recalling some of the old songs I begged Ma to give us ‘Liverpool’s an Altered Town’, & she obliged. Two of the verses I here set down:

  Once on a time, were you inclined your weary limbs to lave sir,

  In summer’s scorching heat, in Mersey’s cooling wave sir,

  You’d only just to go behind the old Church for the shore sir,

  But now it’s past Jack Langan’s half a mile or more sir.

  Oh dear oh, for Liverpool’s an altered town, oh dear oh.

  The spire of famed St Thomas’s, that long had stood the weather,

  Although it was so very high they’ve downed it altogether,

  & the old Dock, the poor old Dock, the theme of many a sonnet,

  They’ve pulled it up & now have a built a Custom House upon it.

  Oh dear oh, for Liverpool’s an altered town, oh dear oh.

  (To think of washing oneself in the Mersey!)

  As I looked upon my betrothed, her face aglow as she talked so kindly with Ma, a fount of pure gratitude sprang up within my breast, & I thanked the Lord God Almighty for the blessing of Emily. To her I owe this happiness, for without that defiance of her sire (now reconciled to the match) we might never have found one another again.

  2nd October 1862

  Another vexing argument with Sandham today – my hand shakes with rage even now to think of it. Some weeks ago I received a letter from the office of Messrs Daubeny & Rudd concerning the designs of a new bank of theirs which I had been asked to present. The chairman & directors of the bank expressed their pleasure upon seeing the working drawings, & looked forward to ‘a bold & imposing edifice that accords with the proud traditions of Liverpool’s foremost merchant bank’, or some such. Then a more cautious letter arrived last Friday enquiring as to whether I might revise my design with reference to sundry structural alterations, which included reducing the size of the windows! I saw this at once for buffoonery, & replied that I would not suffer the windows or anything else to be tinkered with – & if my work displeased them they were at liberty to engage a more pliant architect. This morning Sandham summoned me to his office & read out a letter from Daubeny & Rudd, who have now withdrawn approval of my designs & threaten to cancel the commission altogether. He asked me why I thought it permissible to provoke their client, & to risk losing a contract that would be an object of envy to every practice in the city. I shrugged, & replied that I should not dare to advise them on how to run a bank – why should they presume to tell me how to design a building? At this he became very angry indeed, & dismissed me from his sight.

  17th October 1862

  Peace has been negotiated. Sandham has personally overseen changes to the bank drawings, Daubeny & Rudd are mollified, the construction may now proceed. Sandham declares himself satisfied, and no wonder – he will now take the credit for a building to which he has contributed a handful of ridiculous ‘improvements’ on my own design.

  It is nothing to me what he or the client thinks. I would not claim to be a genius in everything – I cannot paint twilight like Turner, or mimic the cockney tongue like Dickens. But I do know how to make a building both beautiful & functional, & it will be of no use to argue with me about it. My mind is not a bed to be made & re-made.

  Friday, Seventh November, 1862

  Every day this week I have visited the Temple-street site, where building on Janus House – as my design is to be called – proceeds apace. It behoves me to maintain a close scrutiny as it is erected, lest the builders are tempted to bodge or else to make a few pounds by selling off the lead to bluey-hunters. This morning I took Ma & Pa down to inspect the progress. I explained to them the naming of the building – that the Roman god Janus was represented as ‘bifrons’ – with two faces – symbolic of vigilance in looking both before & behind. Where the common practice in commercial building is to show an elegant façade to the street but hide away a mean courtyard at the rear – Queen Anne in front, Mary Anne behind, as it were – my own shall present identical faces at front & back. The frame will be of cast iron – a substance, as Ruskin says, ‘tenacious above all things, ductile more than most’ – with stanchions between which oriel windows shall be suspended in multiply repeated patterns. Thus my method of resolving the gloominess of the street – typical of a northern town, where light is so often blotted out by clouds & soot – lies in a simple proliferation of glass. These oriels will allow daylight to flood through th
e tops & sides of the glass as well as through the front, & the office clerk will thank that architect who saved his eyes from straining.

  Ma was moved to raptures of praise, but then were I to show her a house of mine constructed from a child’s wooden blocks I fancy she would be no less effusive. Pa more restrained, as is his wont, but in his few quiet words of admiration I felt a sincere delight, for it was from him I learned both the rudiments of draughtsmanship – the value of a fine point, precision in detail, the simplest means of expressing light & shade – & furthermore the love of all things sound & solid & well-crafted. I pause to consider this beneficent patrimony. From my mother’s love I have derived my egregious self-esteem; from my father’s tutelage – my means of invention. Blessed is Eames!

  9th January 1863

  Sandham invites a few of his assistants, including myself, to the consecration of the new church in Everton, a district overrun by more of these Gothic monstrosities than it could possibly need or desire. The old dodderer appears to be very pleased with this, his latest design – Heaven alone knows why. The front is stone, with high lancets & some geometrical tracery. The tower & its recessed spire quite drab. The interior is hideously glum & draughty, dominated by thin limestone columns with their sad stiff-leaf capitals & grotesque bases. Not the smallest roguery of detail to be seen. If this edifice has been raised to the greater glory of God then the Almighty has been thoroughly ill-served, & I pity the congregation obliged to worship within its unlovely precincts. The name of the church, it amused me to note, is St James-the-Less: I fancy no one could conceive of a St James-the-Lesser.

  The visit only serves to confirm that Sandham is, if not Liverpool’s own Pecksniff, a hopeless hack of an architect. For now, needs must, but I fear that a long association with his office must be gravely disadvantageous to my prospects.

  Thursday, Twenty-sixth February, 1863

  To Torrington Hall for dinner. Seated there at the Rocksavage family table I was troubled – no, not troubled, I was taken hold of – by a peculiar paradox. The triumph of my engagement to Emily a year ago has since been supplanted by a perception of myself as hobbled, like a horse, or else caged & tamed, like a domestic pet. My wings are, at any rate, clipped, while Emily seems to have discovered a new will to power in her pinions. Perhaps this reversal of roles is common to every man & his betrothed. He has done his work, & gained his prize, & by winning has become a slave. She, conversely, by being ‘caught’, is freed of a restraint that has ever been upon her. Does she rejoice in the knowledge?

  What seems certain is that we both perforce put our privacy at risk: to be married is to be under scrutiny. On such thoughts was I brooding when, later in the evening, Emily found me in the library. ‘Is anything the matter, my love?’ she asked, and when I assured her that all was well, she gaily continued with talk of the house we should occupy when we are married. What was my preference? she wondered. Jestingly I replied that a mansion as commodious as this one would be to my liking, where husband & wife might ensure matrimonial bliss for ever – one in each wing. At this her face clouded, & seeming to believe that I spoke in earnest she upbraided me as cold & unfeeling – if I valued her company so meagrely now, then what possible happiness could we expect in the future, &c., &c. Quickly I had to rescue myself, & seizing her in my arms rained kisses upon her brow & assurances upon her ears. Untimely misgivings, these.

  2nd March 1863

  To dinner with Chiltern & Dalby at the Cockspur, one of the new restaurants that have sprung up around the Exchange. To see the number of swells thronging the room one might have thought the Cockscomb a better name for the place. I confessed to them my sense of being tamed, like a mynah bird – ‘A very minor bird!’ cries Dalby, pleased at his jest. Chiltern ponders the question for some moments, & says, ‘How can you talk of being tamed before you are even married?’ This indeed perplexes me – though the feeling cannot be banished. Then there is the headlong plunge into intimacy that marriage will entail. I have nurtured a friendship with Chiltern & Dalby over a period of years, while Emily I knew barely a twelvemonth before I bound myself to her. I am taking a fearful leap in the dark. ‘Aye,’ said Chiltern, ‘but remember – so too is she.’ By the evening’s end I had drunk so much hock I can scarcely recall what conclusions were reached, though another joke of Dalby’s comes back to me: What fish do wolves generally prefer? Why, lamb-prey of course!

  Tuesday, Tenth March, 1863

  The town has gone quite mad. Chiltern & I were on our way to the Lyceum in the afternoon when we met a frenzied procession of wassailers pouring down Ranelagh-street, shouting, whistling & crushing any unfortunate passers-by flat against the wall. One might imagine the cause of this rowdiness to be another Trafalgar, with Nelson restored to life & borne through the streets to receive the guerdon of a city’s gratitude. Nothing of the sort. The celebrations, it seems, are incident to the marriage in London today of the Prince of Wales & the Princess Alexandra of Denmark. This evening Will (freed from school for the day) leads a party of us through the bustling crowds to see the whole town illuminated, & thence to the Pier-Head where a display of fireworks lights up the river. A splendid & picturesque thing, to be sure, but does the wedding of two strangers, royal as they are, merit these absurd pomposities of demonstration?

  Thursday, Second April, 1863

  The day of our wedding, & I almost contrived to miss it! In the morning I had visited the Temple-street site, having received assurances from Chiltern that he would collect me in the carriage at noon & take us directly to the church at Blundell Sands. I talked to Minton, the clerk of works, who now estimates completion of the job within six months; the scaffolding has been removed to reveal the magnificent façade of glass. The builders have nicknamed it ‘the greenhouse’, he told me, whether out of affection or not I was unable to judge. As the hour struck noon I stepped on to the street in expectation of Chiltern – nowhere to be seen. A half-hour passed, then a clatter of wheels from the direction of Dale-street announced his arrival. He had forgotten our arrangement to meet here & had taken the carriage to Abercromby-sq, where he found the house empty but for the maids, the family just departed, & only then perceived his error. In comical haste we set off, the builders’ dust still thick on my coat, & we were halfway to Kirkdale before I realised I had left my wedding attire at the club. No time to turn back, so there in the coach I tore off my coat and shirt, amid much hysterical laughter, & exchanged them with Chiltern’s. (‘You turncoat!’ &c.) We arrived at St Jude’s (not one of Sandham’s, the Lord be thanked) with ten minutes to spare.

  Thus was I wed in another fellow’s clothes, though my dear Emily in the frantic toing & froing of the day seemed not to notice. Calamity was averted, we are married, & as happy as cicadas.

  The next morning Baines was roused by church bells. They made him think of Eames’s wedding all those years ago, and the couple shyly emerging from St Jude’s to meet the smiling faces of the congregants who had witnessed them at the altar. Happy as cicadas. As he dressed he looked out on to the steep drop of St James’s cemetery, and the half-built cathedral beyond. A few churchgoers were proceeding along Hope Street. Towards the end of the morning the telephone rang.

  ‘So that’s that,’ he heard Jack say, with a heavy sigh.

  ‘That’s what?’

  ‘Have you not had the wireless on? He – the PM – just announced that we’re at war with Germany.’

  ‘Ah …’

  They didn’t talk for long. He felt a queer kind of relief: that the worst had happened, and that the waiting was over. They could swim or they could drown, but treading water was no longer an option. His gas mask grinned at him from the mantelpiece. He picked it up, and held it one-handed, like Hamlet apostrophising the skull.

  ‘Where be your gibes now?’ he whispered to it.

  It was only as he was leaving the flat that he noticed the date on the Sunday newspaper – 3 September 1939. He imagined embassies and government offices in chaos now the ne
ws was out, the sudden swell of crisis and the cheerless prospect of flight or evacuation. He thought of the panic that would flood through the city streets, and the inexorable momentum with which it would course from town to village, thence to the open fields and sequestered vales where a farmhand or a rambler might still have a few more hours of blessed ignorance left to him. And he wondered, amid the rising levels of sound and flurry, if there was anyone else in the world who remembered, or cared, that today was the centenary of Peter Eames’s birth.

  PART TWO

  Falling

  1940–41

  A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every step the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being.

  ‘On the Fear of Death’,

  William Hazlitt

  5

  PICKING HIS WAY over the rubble, Baines caught sight of Richard through the drowning curtain of smoke. At least he thought it was Richard; it was difficult to tell. The standard-issue oilskin capes, gas masks and steel helmets reduced everyone to the same sinister-looking apparition. Suddenly from another direction a whistle blew, and two stretcher-bearers hurried past him in answer to its shrill summons. He sensed a whole theatre of activity going on around him, unseen. When the smoke lifted he could see Richard again, or else the figure who resembled him, waving his arms and beckoning him over to a doorway. He began to move. Beneath the heavy oilskins he was sweating uncomfortably, and though it was only about forty yards to cover it seemed a much greater distance, strewn as it was with crushed masonry and tumbled brickwork. Weighed down by his pack and conscious of his laboured breathing through the mask, he felt like a deep-sea diver lumbering across the ocean floor. Glass crunched under his boots as he sought a secure path through the debris.