The Meaning of Night Part 5

The Clarendon was a respectable hotel, and we had no luggage; but the manager was an old acquaintance of mine and discreetly secured us a room.

We sat up late into the night. This, in summary, is what I told her.

My mother's family, the Mores of Church Langton, were West Country farmers of long standing. Her uncle, Mr Byam More, was land-agent for Sir Robert Fairmile, of Langton Court near Taunton, whose only daughter, Laura, was nearly of an age with my mother. The two little girls grew up together and became the closest of friends, their friendship continuing when Laura married and moved to a Midlands county.

The following year my mother also married, though hers was a much less grand match than her friend's. Laura became Lady Tansor, of Evenwood in Northamptonshire, one of the most enchanting houses in England, and the seat of an ancient and distinguished line; my mother became the wife of a wastrel half-pay officer in the Hussars.

My father always known as 'the Captain' served inconspicuously in the 11th Regiment of Light Dragoons, the celebrated 'Cherrypickers', which later became famous, as the 11th Prince Albert's Own Hussars, under the command of Lord Cardigan, though the Captain was long dead before the regiment's immortal action in the Russian War. He left the regiment after sustaining injury in the Peninsula and was promoted to half-pay; but his leisure was productive of nothing except a renewed dedication to a long-held love of strong liquor, which he pursued vigorously, to the exclusion of all other occupations. He spent little time with his wife, could settle at nothing, and when he was not engaged with his local companions at the Bell and Book in Church Langton, he was away visiting old regimental comrades, and partaking of the usual lively debauchery such occasions afford. The birth of a daughter, it appears, did not encourage him to mend his ways, and on the evening of her untimely death, at only five days old, he was to be found in his usual corner at the Bell and Book. He compounded his iniquity by also being absent I know not where, but I can guess why on the day of the poor child's funeral.

My mother and the Captain, on the latter's insistence, left Church Langton soon afterwards for Sandchurch, where remnants of the Captain's family resided. The change brought no improvement in his behaviour: he merely exchanged the Bell and Book in Church Langton for the King's Head in Sandchurch. I have said enough, I hope, to demonstrate the Captain's execrable character, and his utter contempt for the duties of a husband and father.

In the summer of 1819, my mother accompanied her friend, Laura Tansor, to France, where she stayed for several months. I was born there, in the Breton city of Rennes, the following spring. Some weeks later, the two companions travelled together to Dinan, where they took lodgings near the Tour de l'Horloge. Lady Tansor then departed for Paris whilst my mother remained in Dinan for several more days. But just as she was preparing to leave for St-Malo, she received terrible news from England.

The Captain, returning home late one pitch-black night from the King's Head in an extreme state of inebriation, had wandered off the path, missed his footing, and tumbled over the cliff not twelve yards from his door. Tom Grexby, the village schoolmaster, found him the next morning, his neck quite broken.

The Captain appears to have been perfectly content to let his wife gad off to France with her friend. He found it not in the least inconvenient to have the house to himself, and to be able to spend his leisure unenc.u.mbered by even the few domestic duties required of him when his wife was at home. And so he died, a miserable mediocrity.

On a late summer evening, my mother brought me into Dorset, tucked up in a plaid blanket and laid on her lap, up the long dusty road that leads from the church to the little white-painted house on the cliff-top. Naturally, she received heartfelt sympathy from her friends and neighbours in Sandchurch. To return home husbandless, and with a fatherless child! All about the village, heads could not stop shaking in disbelief at the double calamity. The general commiseration was received by my mother with genuine grat.i.tude, for the sudden death of the Captain had been a severe shock to her, despite his inadequacies as a husband.

All these things I came to know much later, after my mother's death. I pa.s.s now to my own memories of my childhood at Sandchurch.

We lived quietly enough my mother and I, Beth, our maid-of-all-work, and Billick, a grizzled old salt, who chopped wood, tended the garden, and drove the trap. The house faced south across a stretch of soft turf towards the Channel, and from my earliest years the strongest memory I have is of the sound of waves and wind, as I lay in my cradle under the apple tree in the front garden, or in my room, with its little round window set above the porch.

We had few visitors. Mr Byam More, my mother's uncle, would come down from the West Country two or three times a year; and I also have a clear memory of a pale, sad-eyed lady called Miss Lamb, who would sit talking quietly with my mother whilst I played on the rug before the parlour fire, and who would often reach down to stroke my hair, or run her fingers across my cheek, in a most gentle and affecting way, which I can still vividly recall.

For a period of my childhood, my mother suffered from severe depression of spirits, which I now know was caused by the death of her childhood friend, Laura, Lady Tansor, whose name was unknown to me until after my mother's death. Her Ladyship (as I also later learned) had discreetly supported my mother with little gifts of her own money, and other considerations. But when she died, these payments ceased, and things went hard for Mamma, the Captain's paltry legacy to her having long since been exhausted; but she determined that she would do all in her power to maintain ourselves, for as long as possible, in the house at Sandchurch.

And so it came about that the publisher, Mr Colburn, received on his desk in New Burlington-street a brown-paper package containing Edith; or, The Last of the Fitzalans, the first work of fiction from the pen of a lady living on the Dorset coast. The covering letter sent Mr Colburn her very best compliments, and requested a professional opinion on the work.

Mr Colburn duly replied to the lady with a courteous two-page critique of its merits and demerits, and concluded by saying that he would be happy to arrange for publication, though on terms that provided for my mother's contributing towards the costs. This she accepted, using money she could ill afford to speculate with; but the venture was successful, and Mr Colburn came back gratifyingly quickly with a request for a successor, on much improved terms.

So began my mother's literary career, which ran uninterruptedly for over ten years, until her death. Though the income derived from her literary efforts kept us safe and secure, the effort involved was prodigious, and the effects on my mother's const.i.tution only too apparent to me as I grew older and observed her slight hunched form forever bent over the big square table that served her for a desk. Sometimes, when I entered the room, she would not even look up, but would speak gently to me as she continued to write, her face close to the paper. 'What is it, Eddie? Tell Mamma quickly, dear.' And I would tell her what I wanted and she would tell me to ask Beth and off I would go, back to the concerns of my own world, leaving her to scratch away in hers.

At the age of six, or thereabouts, I was put into the pedagogic care of Thomas Grexby. When I joined it, Tom's little school consisted of himself, a plump, blank-faced boy called Cooper, who appeared to find even the most elementary branches of learning deeply mystifying, and me. Master Cooper was set exercises in basic schooling that required him to pa.s.s long hours on his own in strenuous concentration, tongue lolling out with the effort, leaving Tom and I to read and talk together. I made rapid progress, for Tom was an excellent teacher, and I was exceedingly eager to learn.

Under Tom's care I quickly mastered my reading, writing, and numbers; and on the firm foundations thus laid down, he encouraged me to build according to my own inclinations. Every subject, and every topic within every subject, to which Tom introduced me a.s.sailed me with a keen hunger to know more. In this way, my mind began to fill up with prodigious amounts of undigested information on every conceivable topic, from the principles of Archimedes to the date of the creation of the world according to Bishop Ussher.

Gradually, however, Tom began to impose some rigour on this habit of mental acquisitiveness, and I settled down to gain a thorough mastery of the Greek and Latin tongues, and a solid grounding in history and the main vernacular literatures of Europe. Tom was also a dedicated bibliophile, though his attempts to a.s.semble a collection of fine editions of his own were severely curtailed by his always limited means. Still, his knowledge and connoisseurship in this area were considerable, and it was from him that I learned about incunabula and colophons, bindings and dentelles, editions and issues, and all the other minutiae beloved of the bibliographical scholar.

And so things went on until I reached the age of twelve, at which point my life changed.

On the day of my twelfth birthday, in April, 1832, I came down to breakfast to find my mother sitting at her work-table with a wooden box in her hands.

'Happy birthday, Eddie,' she smiled. 'Come and kiss me.'

I did so most willingly, for I had seen little of her in recent days as she struggled to finish yet another work for Mr Colburn and his increasingly demanding deadlines.

'This is for you, Eddie,' she said quietly, holding out the box.

It was deep, hinged, about nine inches square, and made of a rich dark wood, with a pale band of lighter wood running round an inch or so above the base. The lid had raised angled sides and was inlaid on one of the faces with a coat of arms. Two little bra.s.s handles were set on each side, and on the front face was a shield-shaped escutcheon. It stands yet on my mantelpiece in Temple-street.

'Open it,' my mother said gently.

Inside, nestled two soft leather purses, each containing a large quant.i.ty of gold coins. I tumbled them out onto the table. They amounted to two hundred sovereigns.4 Naturally, I could not comprehend how so much money could suddenly find its way to us in this way, when my mother's poor drawn face told so eloquently of what necessity required her to do, constantly and with no prospect of cessation, in order to keep our little family safe from want.

'Where has all this money come from?' I asked in astonishment. 'Mamma, is it yours?'

'No, my love,' my mother replied, 'it is yours, to do with as you like. A present from an old, old friend, who loved you very much, but who will never see you again. She wished for this to be given to you, so that you may know that she will think of you always.'

Now, the only friend of my mother's I could think of was sad-eyed Miss Lamb; and so for some years I cherished the belief, never contradicted by my mother, that she had been my benefactress. Unsure though I was of the source of my good fortune, however, the weight of the coins, as they lay in my cupped hands, had a powerful effect, for I instantly saw that they would allow me to set my mother free from her literary labours. But she refused to countenance such a thing, and with an affronted resoluteness that I had never seen in her before. After some discussion, it was agreed that the money, except for fifty sovereigns, which I insisted she must have, would be placed into the hands of her uncle, for investment in such a way as he would see fit to produce profit on the sum, until I attained my majority.

'There is more, Eddie,' she said.

I was to go to school to a real school, away from Sandchurch. This special friend of my mother's, who had loved me very much, had wished for me to be educated as a foundation boy at Eton College on reaching the age of twelve, and had made arrangements to this effect. That time had now arrived. When the summer was over, and the leaves had fallen from the chestnut-tree by the front gate, in which was my beloved crow's-nest of dreams overlooking the grey waters beyond the cliff edge, and if I succeeded in the examination, I would become a Scholar of the King's College of Our Lady of Eton Beside Windsor, founded by that most devout and unworldly of English monarchs, Henry VI. At first, I did not well know how I should contemplate this momentous change, either for good or ill; but Tom Grexby soon put me right. It was the very best thing that could have happened, he said, and he knew no one better that it would be the making of me.

'Hold fast, Ed,' he said, 'to what we have done together, and go forward to greater things. Your life, your true life, is not here ' he pointed to his breast and the heart beating within it ' but here ', pointing now to his head. 'There is your kingdom,' he said, 'and it is yours to extend and enrich as you please, to the ends of the earth.'

The scholarship examination, taken that July, held no terrors for me, and a letter came soon afterwards with the gratifying intelligence that I had been placed first on the list. Tom and I spent the remainder of the summer reading hard together, and taking long walks along the cliffs in deep conversation about the subjects we both loved. And then the day came; Billick brought the trap round to the front gate, my cases were stowed, and I climbed up beside him. Tom had walked up from the village to see me off and give me a gift to take with me: it was Glanvill's Saducismus Triumphatus, the edition printed by Newcomb for Lownds in 1682.5 I stared in disbelieving delight to hold in my hands a volume I had longed to read ever since Tom had set me to consider Hamlet's celebrated contention to Horatio, on witnessing the appearance of his father's ghost, that heaven and earth contain more things than we can dream of.6 'A little addition to your philosophical library,' he said, smiling. 'But don't tell your mamma she might think I am corrupting your young mind. And be prepared, now, to be tested on it when you come home.' I thanked him most heartily, at which he took my hand and shook it hard the first time anyone had done such a thing. It impressed me strongly that I was no longer a child, but had become a man amongst men.

When all was ready, we waited in the bright and windy sunshine for my mother to come out from the house. When she did, I noticed that she was carrying something, which I soon saw was the box that had contained the two hundred sovereigns from her friend.

'Take this, Eddie, to remind you of the dear lady who has made this possible. I know you will not let her down, and that you will work hard at your lessons and become a very great scholar. You will write, won't you, as soon as you can? And always remember that you are your mamma's best boy.'

And then she took my hand, but she did not shake it, as Tom had done, but placed it to her lips and kissed it.

To Bella, I now told the story of my time as an Eton Colleger; but as the events relating to my time at the school, in particular the manner of my leaving it, are needful for the reader of these confessions to know in some detail, I propose to describe them at a more suitable place in my narrative, together with the story of my life in the immediately succeeding years.

Bella listened attentively, occasionally getting up to walk over to the window as I spoke. When I had finished, she sat in thought for a moment.

'You have said little concerning your present employment,' she said suddenly. 'Perhaps the answer lies there. I confess that I have never been quite clear in my mind what your duties are at Tredgolds.'

'As I have said before, I work in a private capacity for the Senior Partner.'

'You will forgive me, Eddie, if I say that your answer seems a little evasive.'

'Dearest, you must understand that there are professional confidences involved, which do not permit me to say more. But I a.s.sure you that the firm is highly respected, and that my duties there purely of an advisory nature can have no bearing on the present matter.'

'But how can you be sure?'

Her persistence gave me the opportunity I had been looking for. I got up and began to walk around, as if gripped by some deep thought.

'Perhaps you are right,' I said at last. 'Perhaps I have overlooked the possibility of some antagonism arising from my work.'

I continued to pace the floor, until at last she came over to where I was standing.

'Eddie, what is the matter? You look so strangely.'

She gripped my hand imploringly.

It was cruel of me to let her suffer in this way; but as I could not tell her the truth, I had no choice but to let her think that the cause of the note lay in some matter connected with my employment. And so I resorted to the lie direct.

'There is a man,' I said at last, 'a client of the firm's, who blames me for the failure of a case he has recently brought, on which the firm advised.'

'And do you think this man could have written the note?'

'It is possible.'

'But for what purpose? And the note itself why was it sent to me? And why does it say that you are not what you seem?'

I told her the man I suspected of writing the note was rich and powerful, but of notorious reputation; that he might have no other wish than to sow discord between us, to pay me back for my perceived part in the failure of his suit. She considered this for a moment, and then shook her head.

'It was sent to me! How did he know about me, or where I lived?'

'Perhaps he has set someone to follow me,' I ventured. At this, her whole body stiffened, and she gave a little gasp.

'Am I in danger, then?'

This, I said, was very unlikely, though I begged her not to go out again without the protection of Mr Braithwaite.

We continued to talk, as midnight came and went. I promised Bella that I would find out the truth and, if my suspicions proved correct, bring charges against the man, a.s.suring her over and over that the implications of the note were false. But she remained visibly agitated, and it was plain that I had succeeded only in making the situation worse by my clumsy fabrication. We lay together on the bed, fully clothed, for an hour or so, saying nothing. Then, just before first light, she asked me to take her back to St John's Wood.

We slipped out of the side-door of the Clarendon into a bitter yellow fog, walking through the almost deserted streets in silence, each of us wrapped in our own thoughts.

Arriving at Blithe Lodge, I asked if I might call on Sunday.

'If you wish,' she said flatly, taking out a key from her reticule and opening the door.

She did not turn to kiss me.

5:.

Mors certa1 _*

I returned to Temple-street, but could not settle. Sleep was impossible; and I had no taste for reading, or for anything else for that matter. I could not even bring myself to take down my much-thumbed copy of Donne's sermons which, like a cold bath, would usually invigorate my faculties and set me back on the path of action. I simply sat, sunk in gloomy reflection, before the empty fireplace.

I deeply regretted lying to Bella; but deceit had become a habit with me: I had already betrayed her, and continued to do so. I lived for another, hungered for another, dreamed only of possessing another, though she was now lost to me forever. How, then, could I tell her the truth? I could only lie to her. It was the lesser evil.

By the faint gleam of the staircase lamp below my window I could see the fog clinging and oozing against the gla.s.s. A dreary mood slid into me irresistibly, like a knife. Harder, deeper, it bit. I knew where it would end. I tried, as always, to hold it at bay, but to no avail. The blood began to thump in my temples until I could stand it no more; and so, submitting to my demons, as I knew I would, I threw on my great-coat again and descended the stairs. Great Leviathan's unsleeping, inviting maw beckoned.

I found her where I knew I would, where they could always be found while a fragment of night remained returning home from the West-end.

I caught up with her on the corner of Mount-street. A few words pa.s.sed, and the bargain was secured.

The house was kept by a Jewess, who even at this late hour opened the door to her knock and regarded us suspiciously as we ascended three cramped flights of stairs to a long low chamber on the third floor.

The place was spa.r.s.ely but decently furnished, and moderately clean. At the far end of the room, beneath a boarded-up window, a ginger kitten slept in a box festooned with bright red ribbons and with his name, 'Tyger', written in crude letters on the side; on a table close by lay a pile of half-finished needlework, the arm of a thick velvet dress hanging down towards the floor like a dead thing. At the other end of the room, alongside a half-curtained window that gave onto the street, stood a single French bed-stead draped with a patched and faded cover, too short for concealing the unemptied chamber-pot beneath.

'Do you have a name?' she asked.

'Geddington,' I replied, smiling. 'Ernest Geddington. General footman. And what do they call you?'

'You may call me Lady Jane,' came her answer, in a tone of strained jocularity. 'And now, Mr Ernest Geddington, general footman, I suppose you must be ready to judge the quality of the goods on offer.'

She is a slight, auburn-haired girl of about twenty years of age and speaks with a quiet c.o.c.kney intonation roughened by her life in smoke-filled places. Her attempt at levity is hollow. Her eyes are tired, the smile forced. I notice her red knuckles, her thin white legs, and that she coughs quietly every few seconds. Swaying uneasily on her tired and swollen feet, she begins undressing until she stands before me, shivering slightly, in just her chemise and drawers.

She leads me backwards towards the bedstead, and sits down.

'Your carriage awaits you, Mr Geddington,' she says, the exhaustion now plain in a barely withheld yawn.

'Oh no, my lady,' says I, turning her round as I speak. 'I know my place. I'll take the back stairs, if you please.'

And so to Bluegate-fields, dangerous and deadly. A black gash of damp stone leads up from a narrow court and into another kind of fog, dry and burning, which hurts the eyes as it curls and drifts about the room. A Lascar is huddled on the dirty, rain-stained floor, another attenuated figure mumbles in a far corner, and an empty divan awaits.

I lie down, am handed the instrument of dreams, loaded with its potent freight, and the dissolution begins. Clouds, piercing sunlight, the shining peaks of eternal mountains, and a cold green sea. An elephant gazes at me with a look of ineffable compa.s.sion in its small dark eyes. A man with red hair whose face I cannot see.

The boundaries of this world are forever shifting from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.

I admit these degradations because they are true, as true as anything else in this confession; as true as the killing of Lucas Trendle and my hate of Phoebus Daunt; and as true as the cursed love I hold, and will always hold, for her whom I cannot yet name. If these acts disgust you, then it must be so. I do not cannot seek to excuse them, or explain them; for the terrible itching urge to wander perpetually , like some poor Ahasuerus,2 between light and darkness, will stay with me, driving me under its goad, until the day of my death.

A reviving cigar and I return to the fog-weighted streets. Once again, I wearily climb the stairs to my rooms in Temple-street as the day struggles into life.

On reaching my sitting-room, I slumped heavily into the chair by the fireplace I had left some hours before and fell into a deep untroubled sleep.

I awoke with a start a little before noon, thinking of Jukes.

Fordyce Jukes, my neighbour on the ground floor. His greasy, cunning look and insinuating manners: 'So nice to see you, Mr Glapthorn. Always a pleasure, Mr Glapthorn. A touch cold today, Mr Glapthorn.' The opportune opening of his door as I pa.s.s up or down the stairs; the glutinous smile of greeting; and always the infallible sense of a watching eye at my back.

It was Jukes! I was sure of it. I should have seen it immediately. He had followed me that night to Cain-court. He knew it all.

He was a clerk in the offices of Tredgold, Tredgold & Orr, solicitors, of Paternoster-row, where I was also employed, and of which I shall have occasion to speak more fully hereafter. Clever enough, certainly; educated enough, with sufficient knowledge of my comings and goings to ensnare me; and to clinch it I already suspected him of enriching himself at the expense of the firm. Yes, it must be Jukes. We had never spoken of Bella, it was true: our conversations had been scrupulously neutral on all personal matters; but he had found her out.

What had begun it? I knew him to be a d.a.m.ned inquisitive meddler; my nocturnal ramblings were frequent, and the stairs would have creaked out my exits to his always receptive ears. An urge one night impossible for this ultracrepidarian sneak to resist to follow me out, to see where I went and what I did, then repeated on other nights until a habit is formed. How many shadows had welcomed his watching eye; how many doorways; how many dark and secret places?

Then, one late-October night, he follows me again, a little earlier than usual, puzzled by the apparent lack of any specific intent or objective, as I make my way to Threadneedle-street. He cannot see Lucas Trendle standing outside the Bank: only I can see him. But he continues to watch, still puzzled, as I proceed westwards towards the Strand.

He cannot know why I committed the deed he witnessed, but he knows I did it. He knows.

The revelation galvanizes me. After splashing my face with cold water, I descend the stairs. His door stays closed and there is no sound from within, for these are of course his usual hours at Tredgolds. But I know that he must have contrived to be absent from the office for the afternoon in order to carry out his intention to confront me at Stoke Newington, or at least to satisfy himself that I have accepted his invitation to pay my last respects to Lucas Trendle. All the same, I stop at the foot of the staircase and contemplate forcing an entrance to his chambers, in order to secure confirmation that the hand responsible for the two anonymous notes was his. But this, I decide, is both foolhardy and unnecessary; so I step out into the street, to execute the plan I have formed.

I am in Chancery-lane in time for the half-past twelve omnibus to Stoke Newington, for it is November the third, and Mr Lucas Trendle is to be buried. The omnibus comes and leaves without me I do not intend to take any chances. I therefore hold back, observing every face that pa.s.ses along the street, every stationary or loitering figure. Now I move to the back of the queue for the next green 'Favourite', which I board, and then immediately descend as it pulls away. Satisfied that I have not been followed, I finally take my place on the one o'clock vehicle, and arrive at last at my destination.

Through the portals of Death,3 surmounted by hieroglyphs announcing 'The Gates of the Abode of the Mortal Part of Man', I walked into Abney Cemetery, in the quiet village of Stoke Newington. London lay behind me, beneath a louring and obscuring red-yellow pall interposed between earth and sky, the progeny of a million chimneys. But here the air was clear, the day dull, but with a promise of brightness.

It wanted an hour until the time. I wandered, as a casual visitor might, amongst the s.p.a.cious lawns and Lebanon cedars, observing the monuments of granite and marble some striking, most of a becoming simplicity, for this was a resting-place for Non-Conformist mortality; the petrified angels; the columns and draped urns. I examined the small Gothic Chapel, and then made my way over to a fenced-off spot, around a large and venerable chestnut, that marked the favourite place of retirement of Dr Watts,4 friend of the former Lady Abney, and tutor to her daughters.

Lingering here, I looked about me, taking in the patterns of paths and walkways, and trying to picture to myself how events might unfold.

Would Jukes risk a direct approach in such a place? Would he take me quietly aside and put some proposal to me for the maintenance of his silence? I could not feel in the least physically threatened by him a stunted, weaselly fellow and was, in any case, well prepared for that eventuality. I would take the initiative and suggest a quiet discussion of the matter, gentleman to gentleman. He would be appreciative of my consideration: no need for unpleasantness, no need at all. Simply a little matter of business. A stroll, perhaps, towards the chapel, and a further meeting arranged at some mutually convenient place and time in town in order to conclude matters. Then I would secure my advantage, complete and final.