by Louis Bayard
—That chap had a father, I think. An actor like him. Can’t recollect the name offhand, but quite good in what was that play, the one with the Jew?
He is trying his best, this old gentleman. It isn’t his fault he isn’t Mr. McReady.
They go to see the Keans many times after that, and the boy grows quite comfortable in their boudoir. The trouble is he must always leave it. He must come back to Camden Town. Not to the same house as before, no: the father’s salary is enough now for moving up in the world—a few blocks, at least—and the family now has a maid. (The mother follows the poor thing round the house, making sure she has emptied the ashes properly and hasn’t singed the bread or beaten the rugs upwind.) It is not the castle in which the boy almost certainly began life, but it is, all in all, a fine bourgeois establishment, with bay windows and railed areaways and, most miraculous of all, a bedroom for each of the children.
But it still has a garret, almost indistinguishable from the one the family left behind. And this is where the boy finds himself most afternoons and evenings. Reading, reading. The once-banned Jonson and the second half of Shakespeare’s sonnets and Keats and Sterne and Hobbes and Kant. And Hume, under whose spell he spends each day refusing to believe his family will necessarily be there the following morning. This is fully in accord with the mythos into which he has been indoctrinated.
The boy reads in the garret because it is the one place where he can be sufficiently alone—and of course the one place that most accentuates his aloneness. Staring through the narrow grid of the window mullions, he sees able-bodied boys and men striding past, jaunty and crowing and charged with animal promise. Striding into their future. Creating their own boudoirs. While there he sits, still dreaming, still waiting for The Event, which is his private term for the public realisation of his destiny. He envisions it as a carriage, a grey brougham pausing at the curb in front of his house, opening its door.
The carriage never comes. And that is when the boy begins to get well. Because it is either get well or stay in that garret for the rest of his life. And he believes, still he believes, that he is meant for better things. He just doesn’t know what they are. Down to the present day, he persists, not knowing.
Chapter 12
I FIRST MET SIGNOR ARPELLI three summers ago. He was selling halfpenny ices from a barrow in Saffron Hill, one of about ten Italian gentlemen crowded into the same small court for the same unremunerative purpose. For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity—I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes.
In any event, I bought ices from him whenever I was passing through, and one day, I stopped a pair of boys from running off with his barrow, a small act for which he was lavishly grateful. It was then he sketched for me the impressive downward trajectory of his life: artist’s atelier in Pisa, doomed romance with a contino’s daughter, duel, hair’s-breadth escape across Lake Geneva, portrait painting on the Rive Gauche, half-voluntary servitude to a Montmartre charcutier, steerage across the Channel…halfpenny ices.
Since then, his fortunes have improved somewhat. A banker in Portland Place hired him to teach Italian to his three corvine daughters, but that ended abruptly when the banker absconded to Honduras with a mess of securities. More recently, Arpelli has gone into business with a French card dealer: the two of them earn a modest income replacing signs and tickets for linen drapers and small merchants. Each morning, M. d’Antin scours the windows of Regent and Oxford Streets for some especially dingy specimen of lettering, then rushes into the offending establishment with a flutter of handkerchief and a trailing moan: “But this thing in your window! It is too awful!” Caught dead to rights, the guilty merchant atones for his aesthetic crime by commissioning a new work.
It is Arpelli’s job to carry out the commission, in a small attic in High Holborn—a hot, close space, even in the dead of winter. And yet when I come knocking, he is sporting the costume he wears all year round: a weathered woollen jacket pulled up at the collar, as though to keep off a north wind. He holds his paintbrush as casually as a fountain pen, and periodically breaks off work to toss morsels of bread to a pink mouse that sits obediently by his elbow.
—Good morning, signor.
—Mr. Cratchit! What a surprise. And how kind of you to visit me in my studio.
—Business is good?
—It is….
He gestures towards the square of cardboard that has been occupying him for the past half hour:
Try our own dripping at 6d. a lb.
—The masterpieces must wait, Mr. Cratchit.
—It was ever so.
—May I offer you some cocoa?
—No. Thank you, no.
He pulls a tangle of hair from his forehead, brushes a crumb from his moustache. Smiles.
—There is something I may do for you, Mr. Cratchit?
—I’m very sorry to trouble you. I wonder if I might borrow an hour of your time.
—An hour?
—I’m in rather urgent need of an interpreter.
The truth is, I am prepared to take any of several tacks with him. Flattery. Pathos. The call of the motherland, the spirit of Father Christmas. I am prepared to argue, propitiate, bribe. None of that proves necessary. All it takes is a brief perusal of my eyes, and Signor Arpelli is opening his hands and saying:
—I am a happy man, Mr. Cratchit. I may at last repay my debt to you. You will please wait while I leave a note for M. d’Antin.
Minutes later, we are strolling arm in arm down Chancery Lane, as companionable as school chums. I have always wondered at the transformative powers of personality—Arpelli is the most signal exemplar I know. His clothes are not conspicuously new, his shirt linen is too thick to be elegant, the boots rather too square to be fashionable, the greatcoat too heavily fondled by its previous owners. And still he carries himself like a manor-born dandy. Walks on the outside of the sidewalk, sidesteps the coffee stalls with practised ease, smiles benevolently on the newsboys, the wall workers, the chimney sweeps.
And when he sees me glance over my shoulder, he mimes the same gesture, as if it were the gentlest of pastimes. And with an air of utmost tact, he murmurs:
—I think perhaps we are being followed, Mr. Cratchit.
—I’m inclined to agree, signor.
—Followed most inadequately, I should add. By a tall man in a velveteen jacket.
—And a blue-check waistcoat.
—The same.
Arpelli removes two purses from his coat pocket, tucks one into an inner compartment, and pats it back to sleep.
—This gentleman is an acquaintance of yours, Mr. Cratchit?
—No.
—Perhaps you know his employer.
—In a manner of speaking.
—And you will forgive my asking twice, but where is it we are going?
—Craven Street.
—Very good.
Arpelli snaps up the brim of his hat and gives his moustache a quick caress.
—If you please, he says.
Just the barest pressure on my arm, and we are moving. Not forwards, as before, but on a tangent, and with all deliberate speed, so that the Strand is soon left behind, and before I can get my bearings, we are passing into a narrow alley, musty and unregarded. The backsides of flats rise up on all sides, and whatever light the day once offered is gone, and a vague claustrophobia gnaws at my stomach as I whirl around just in time to see the man in the velveteen jacket pause at the alley’s entrance, then continue past.
—He will return, says Arpelli. Don’t you agree?
A flight of steps carries us into Strand Lane and then to an old watch house, in whose archway Arpelli pauses. Leaning on a rusted iron railing, he makes a show of consulting his timepiece.
—An ideal time for a plunge, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Cratchit?
It has taken me this long to realise where we are: the old Roman bath.
But then, it’s been twelve years since I was here last. Dragged by one of Uncle N’s religious enthusiasts, who was convinced the waters were fed by the Holy Well of St. Clement and had curative properties. Cold is the only property I can recall at present: the ague I contracted here kept me in bed for three days.
That memory rises in me now like a foreboding, but rather than wait for my protest, Signor Arpelli skips down the stone steps into the brick vault. And as I follow him, it seems we are dropping into another time altogether. The sulphurous tendrils of air, the tingle of rot, the faintly overlapping slaps of water in the crucifer-shaped plunge pool—everything breathes a spell of antiquity.
And the bath attendant himself is the very image of Charon: a hairless, toothless, almost jawless man, rasing us from his memory even as he hands us our towels and robes.
—They’ll be no undue splashin’. And please to keep the voices to a pleasin’ murmur.
As we pass into the changing room, I feel Arpelli’s hand once again in the crook of my arm, drawing me back with him into a tiny niche. And there we wait, hidden from view, eyes fastened on the entranceway. We wait.
Not for long, as it turns out. The footsteps announce themselves like a judgement, echoing with unnatural volume against the arched ceiling. The man in question arrives a full minute later, scratching the lapel of his velveteen jacket and offering Charon the most tentative of smiles.
—Excuse me, we hear him say.—I was meaning to meet a couple of friends here.
I whisper in Arpelli’s ear:
—You should know, I’m not the fleetest of runners.
—I am relieved to report that running will not be necessary, Mr. Cratchit, I myself being too old for such games. This way, please.
We never do make it to the changing room. A yard or so shy of the entranceway, Arpelli draws me off to the left into a region of pure darkness. The hand now leaves my elbow, and Arpelli disappears without a word.
Paralysed, unable to see more than an inch in front of me, I wait there in the blackness, listening for some report of my companion: a shuffling footstep, the tiniest grunt. But the only sounds come from the region of light. The churning of the Holy Well water against the brick. The pensive footsteps of the velveteen man, converging on our hiding place.
Riveted there in the darkness, I suck in my breath, willing myself into invisibility. My muscles quiver from the combined impulses of holding still and jerking into flight, and just when I think they will explode from the contradiction, Arpelli’s hand reappears—like light made palpable—drawing me even further into the dark.
As if to compensate for the loss of sight, my other senses prickle into full maturity. My lips taste whale oil. My nostrils pick out a wafting trail of salt. The hair on my skin dances to the music of magnets.
And my ears discern a voice, Signor Arpelli’s voice, impossibly distant.
—Close it behind you, if you would.
It takes some groping before my hands find what he means—a flat abraded stone surface that yields with surprising ease. As it swings back, it herds the sound before it, so that even the footsteps of the velveteen man enter a realm of memory.
—Take my arm, Mr. Cratchit. We haven’t far to go.
Slow is our pace, a half-step at a time. The smell of salt intensifies as we pass through the darkness, as if to season the other smell that gathers around us, thick and vegetative. At one point, seeking an anchor, I lean against a greasy sponge of wall, which quickly gives way, swallowing my arm all the way to the elbow before I am able to pull it out again.
The claustrophobia ebbs, and after a few minutes, my eyes begin seizing on shapes—dim and bleary-blue—and none blearier than Arpelli, leading me onward. His steps are so sure, his manner so calm, I am tempted more than once to ask how he came to know this causeway so intimately. There is a map, perhaps, some fragile parchment passed down through a lineage of Italian spelunkers, dating all the way back to the Roman centurions who dug these channels out of the earth. But the shroud of arcana in which Arpelli is robed admits for no explanation, and so we pass on in silence.
And now the path rises very gradually beneath our feet—the gentlest of inclines—and the darkness opens out into dimensions, and for the first time, I am able to walk unaided. But Arpelli, far from consigning me to my fate, hoops his hand all the more protectively round my elbow, and as we walk the final yards, we assume a constitutional gait. There is one last barrier—a heavy oaken door with no handle—and Arpelli gives it such an indolent kick one would think this was the most natural ritual in the world.
—After you, Mr. Cratchit.
One last flight of stone steps, and the day rears up before us, its pallor lambent now to my dark-adjusted eyes. Compassless, I squint up at an enormous Doric column…a span of granite…seagulls and pigeons wheeling in mad circles.
—Waterloo Bridge, says Arpelli.—Not the accustomed angle.
I check the coordinates. Somerset House to the east. The handsome Roman arches of the Adelphi Terrace. And directly before us, the river, with the high, belching chimneys of a passing tug, and a colony of gulls floating placidly as ducks. And an oncoming front of amber fog, nullifying everything.
—We will stay by the river for now, Mr. Cratchit. And we will take the precaution of doubling back, in the unlikely event we are still being followed.
From here, it is a leisurely fifteen minutes’ walk to Craven Street, and having assured ourselves twice over that we are unescorted, we slip into the topsy-turvy lodging house and clamber up the stairs. I am already raising my hand to knock when I notice a tiny splinter of light coming from the room inside.
The door is ajar.
Arpelli’s eyes meet mine. We pause for a moment to gather ourselves and then, on a silent count, push the door open.
I can’t say what it is I am expecting to find—no particular nightmare has imprinted itself on my brain—but this is not even in the realm of possibility. A family tableau, shocking in its completeness. Colin by the window, whistling a sea chantey as he buffs his shoes. Philomela on the hearth rug, applying a damp calico cloth to the Captain’s headless elephant figurine and pausing just once to stroke the tabby that has coiled itself round her feet. And the benign paterfamilias of Captain Gully, camped in his chair, with the Times streaming across his lap, and on his face a look of genial abstraction that turns apologetic the moment he sees me.
—Christ! Did we forget to lock it again?
His spirits swiftly restored, he hoists the newspaper like a sail.
—Suicide in Shadwell, Tim. Jumped right off the pier. Care to go for a bit of dredge tonight?
—I can’t, Captain.
—Come now! Gully was thinkin’ we could make a reg’lar party of it, us and the boy and the lass. Reg’lar family outing.
—I’m afraid I’m already engaged for a party. Colin, too. Some other night, perhaps.
His spirits are too abundant to be doused completely. Rolling his eyes, he allows as how there are always going to be folks itching to kill themselves.
—Specially round Christmas, he adds with a knowing look.
And then he rattles the paper back into place and rejoins the tableau, and I feel much the way I felt on entering Mrs. Sharpe’s drawing room that long-ago night. The interloper. The chord that won’t resolve.
—Philomela, I’d like you to meet Signor Arpelli.
She has replaced her dress with a pair of trousers, a fustian plasterer’s apron, and a cambric shirt that, unless my eyes deceive me, belong to her host. No denying it makes for a comical costume on her, but she carries herself with equanimity, never once trips as she crosses the room, even though the trouser legs have wrapped themselves under her feet, and she inclines her head very nicely and extends her hand to Arpelli, who studies it with merry-melancholy eyes.
—Buongiorno, signorina. Come sta?
What is it like, I wonder, hearing one’s native tongue spoken again after a long absence? All I know for cer
tain is that Philomela waits awhile before disgorging her reply:
—Bene, grazie.
And that is as far as I am able to follow, for very soon they have lapsed into intonations and inflections that resonate as strangely in my ear as the call of falcons, and before long their entire bodies have entered the conversation—arms, hands, shoulders—a kind of streetside theatre as riveting as it is unintelligible.
And then Arpelli breaks off and opens his arms to me.
—It is very delightful. This girl and I, we are both of us Calabrese.
—Is that…oh, I see….
—And now I am going to propose something distinctly un-Calabrese, Mr. Cratchit. I am going to ask you and your friends to step into the hallway, if that will not be too dreadful an imposition. I think it might be best, you see, if Philomela and I enjoyed a short spell of privacy.
The hallway is indeed large enough to accommodate the three of us, but the captain seems deeply reluctant to quit his own lodging. And as the door fastens after us, I understand why: we have thrust him into the belly of the beast. As the minutes pass, his nostrils dilate, and beads of perspiration well up along his neckline, and his eyes dart in all directions, scouring every niche and crevice of the stairwell for predators.
—That was a purr. Damn it, we heard us a purr.
Colin, already bored by the cats, uses the interval to go over his recital program.
—Start in with “Cherry Ripe,” that’s always good for a hand. But not knowing the crowd or anythink, maybe “The Tartar Drum” or “The Banks of the Blue Moselle”? Not sure. Save “Isle of Beauty” for later, I expect, people need to be a bit stewed for that one, then finish with “The Mistletoe Bough”—that’s fetched me many a dinner in my day. What I don’t know is, should I insert a character song—somethink along the lines of “Sam Hall” or “Jack Sheppard”—or is that too racy for this bunch?
The program is still in flux when Arpelli emerges from Gully’s flat, and everything else is suddenly in flux, too, because there’s something about the way he closes the door behind him, something about the clipped demeanour, the smile curling into a frown…yes, I’m back in the old house, I’m standing outside Mother’s room, and that Harley Street physician with the hairy brow is resting his hand on Father’s shoulder, speaking in that low, resigned tone perfected at a million bedsides: “Won’t be long, Bob.”
