Mr. Timothy

by Louis Bayard

  Seldom has a wronged woman made so triumphal an entrance. Her hair has been swept back into a virginal chignon. Her head is arranged at an angle of virtue. Her eyes fix on a point in the upper ether as she advances with tiny, brave steps. To my mind, the one thing that spoils the effect is her decision to wear yesterday’s dress. The rent has been ostentatiously fastened with pink ribbon, and from time to time, her hand flies to it, as though it were a scabbing wound.

  —Your name, please.

  —Miss Sally Grenville.

  —Please state your complaint against this man.

  —Well, it were like this, your lordship. Picture it, if you will. A young girl, out for a stroll on a brisk December afternoon. Walkin’ ’long the thoroughfare, takin’ the air, hummin’ a bit of seasonal ditty to herself….

  —Evocative, thank you.

  —Well, if you were her—and believe me, I were her…well, then, wouldn’t you be surprised—I mean, taken all the way aback—to see this particular gentleman comin’ right alongside you?

  —In fact, why were you surprised?

  —Well, he were a stranger, weren’t he? And then, your grace, it weren’t so much the comin’ up, it were what he said after he come up. If you must know, he made an indecent suggestion. Actually whispered it in my ear in broad daylight, if you can stand it.

  —And what was his suggestion?

  —Oh, I couldn’t speak it, your grace. Not in front of all these good people.

  —Why don’t you whisper it in my ear, then?

  With a rueful smile, she shuffles to the magistrate’s desk, drops a most becoming curtsy, and cups her hand around his right ear. A brief pause, followed by the magistrate’s dry voice:

  —Very colourful. You may return.

  How vexing not to be able to gauge his expression. All I can detect is a slight tilting of his head, but whether he is appreciating her effect or trying to assay it, I cannot determine.

  —And after this suggestion was whispered in your ear, Miss Grenville?

  —Why, I let him know I was not the sort as would take him up on a proposition like that. My sainted mother never raised such a girl, is what I told him. And that’s when he grabbed a-hold of me. Grabbed with all his force and tore at my dress. Which you can see it yourself, Your Grace, is tore clean all the way down t’here.

  —Yes, I do see.

  —Well, that’s when I started in to screaming. And the horror must’ve grown so upon me, why, I fainted dead in the street. Which is not my custom. And after I come to, they told me the man in question were in custody, and Lor’, was I grateful! Preying on defenseless women such as myself, it’s a wonder anyone can walk the streets these days, may God defend us all!

  Until now, Annie has stood with great forbearance against the back wall, arms folded across her chest. But this pious oration is more than she can abide. Ignoring Peter’s restraining hand, she takes two strides forwards and, in her most trumpeting tone, declares:

  —Your worship, this is the ripest form of nonsense!

  —Silence!

  The sheer volume of the clerk’s voice sends veins of bright purple shooting across his bald crown. Annie presses on as though he were living in another county.

  —My brother-in-law is the gentlest man alive, your worship, and anyone who says else is a barefaced liar.

  The clerk is beside himself now.

  —Turn this woman out! Clear the office!

  —You shall not turn me out. I will be sworn.

  From there, matters get quite out of hand, and the wonder is that in the midst of all the cacophony, something so quiet as the magistrate’s clearing his throat should even register. And yet register it does, for the assailants disarm at once—subsiding into dagger looks—while the magistrate carries on in the same unruffled tone as before.

  —Mr. Fairweather, with all due respect, I believe the decision to clear the office is mine to make. Good Mrs.….

  —Cratchit.

  —I must beg you, please, to be silent for the time being. Otherwise, I really shall have to turn you out, and that would distress me to no end. As it is, I have just a few more questions for this young lady, and until I am finished, I must beg everyone’s kind indulgence. Thank you very much. Now, Miss Grenville.

  —Yes, your lordship?

  —If I’m not mistaken, you and I have met before. In this very room, in fact, on at least two or three previous occasions.

  —Have we? I don’t recall, your holiness.

  —I nearly failed to recall it myself. You were dressed rather differently then.

  —Was I?

  —It is fortunate I have a tolerably good memory for faces. And for names, too. Yours, if I remember correctly, was Sweet Sally.

  The eyes enlarge ever so slightly. A titter, a swatting of the hand.

  —Oh, I’ve had coves call me lots of different names. They meant no harm by ’em, I’m sure.

  —No, indeed. Although on your last two visits here, I believe you were charged with annoying passersby.

  —Well, that’s as in the eye of the beholder, ain’t it? It were my contention they was annoying me.

  —As it is your contention today. Let me see—before that, there was a charge of public drunkenness. Public lewdness prior to that. And beyond that, I lose track. The mists of memory and all that….

  Oh, this is not part of her intended effect, surely. That heavy lower lip, that drooping jaw.

  —Of course, we are always happy to see you, Miss Grenville. But I am afraid your past conduct has not left you with a sterling reputation for veracity.

  Visibly quivering now, eyes flashing from side to side, Sweet Sally wheels about and, in one last beseeching gesture, points towards the black-garbed missionary.

  —She saw it, too!

  —I’m sure she did, Miss Grenville. Handmaidens of God are always seeing something, aren’t they?

  And now it is Miss Binny’s turn to express surprise: a reeling motion that evokes the (now dear) memory of Colin feinting a punch to her head. The magistrate pauses, wondering, perhaps, if water or smelling salts are in order, and then bears onwards.

  —As it happens, I myself have some personal acquaintance with the accused, and I can testify to his character quite as well as his admirable sister-in-law. I therefore declare these charges groundless, and I herein discharge him.

  It is the first crack I have seen in the formidable Binny facade: a slackening of the face, like a wax doll left too long in the sun. She has poise enough, however, to give a peremptory shake of the head to Sweet Sally, who, thus chastened, shoves one fist all the way into her mouth to stifle her outrage.

  But no one is more put out than the clerk, Mr. Fairweather, who turns grape from crown to collarbone and begins leaping up and down like a splenetic troll.

  —Your worship! This is peculiar, this is erratic….

  —Clear the office, Fairweather. There’s a good chap.

  Only one thing keeps me from quitting the room posthaste: the desire to know my saviour. But the way to him is still blocked, and when I try to crane my head, I am met by the incoming tide of my lawyer, who is already jacking my hand.

  —Sheldrake came, Mr. Cratchit. Sheldrake saw. Sheldrake conquered.

  He must take my mumbling for agreement, for his chest swells as he says:

  —None of that, Mr. Cratchit, justice is my reward. Dame Justice, in whose temple I am but a lowly hierophant. Now then. To whom shall I send the invoice?

  I am just about to suggest a proper receptacle when I am interrupted by the voice of the magistrate.

  —Oh, Mr. Cratchit! One word, if you please.

  And still the hand refuses to budge. And as I come round the desk, I half expect to find additional screens sprouting up on all sides, hand after hand, a palisade of fingers. But after a few paces, the vista is clear, and the view that opens before me is of an elderly, heavy-eared man with a pickled grin and a nod of practiced affability.

  Squidgy.

&nbs
p; Squidgy’s face, at any rate, and his voice, too, shedding its disguise now and addressing me once again like a fellow clubman.

  —You’ll excuse my not hailing you ex officio, Timothy. One does have these pesky protocols to follow.

  I stand before him, dredging for words, and the only candidates that emerge are:

  —Is your back feeling better?

  —Oh, my, yes.

  —Not still…not still itching or anything?

  —Hardly notice it now. But see here, Timothy, you really must stay away from the Sweet Sallys of the world. Mrs. Sharpe’s girls are of a higher order, if that’s what you’re after. And while you’re at it, stay away from the Sheldrakes of the world.

  —You may be assured of that.

  —And do have someone look at that eye, it’s a fright.

  —Yes, thank you. Thank you, Mr….

  Squidgy. That’s what I want so desperately to call him: Mr. Squidgy. But if there is an alternative name, the gentleman in question is not saying. He hunches his shoulders over his game of patience; he proffers a half-salute.

  —Off you go now. Trotty-trot.

  Peter and Annie would prefer me to come home with them, but I have other errands to attend to, and so, apart from my profuse thanks, the only reward they receive for their pains this morning is the prospect of my retreating back. And still they follow me, in my mind: a pair of invisible rebukes on either side, mutating block by block into something slightly warmer.

  I have need of warmth. In my confusion, I seem to have left my greatcoat in the station-house cell. Too late to go back for it—Lushing Leo has by now claimed ownership—and too cold to go entirely without. So I stop in an old-clothes shop and, for want of anything better, grab a tattered green comforter, which the dealer is willing to part with for a few shillings. And as I wrap it round my neck and shoulders and bear it down the street, its weight becomes indistinguishable from the weight of memory. For this is how Father used to travel, isn’t it? Every working day, from the Royal Exchange all the way home to Bayham Street, he kept that moth-chewed comforter wrapped round him like ermine.

  Surely now, at this moment of unexpected doubling, surely this is the time for him to reappear. But he is scrupulously absent as I make my way back to Craven Street. Or else I am less able to see him. My right eye has closed up almost completely, leaving nothing but a slot the size of a coin, and my left eye, by way of compensation, pulls too hard to port, dragging me off course, and as I stagger along the pavement, tracing my usual roundabout path, it dismays me to think I have become a spectacle, something that passersby must account for. As I climb the stairs to Gully’s chambers, the apologia is forming in my throat:

  There’s a reason, you see. It happened like this….

  And in my eagerness to explain myself, I nearly blurt everything to the brindled cat that has settled itself by Gully’s door. A fat and lolling cat, even by this house’s standards, enjoying the new amnesty, licking the puddle of milk that someone—Philomela, no doubt—has poured along the floor there. Licking so hard that the milk has turned clean red.

  Chapter 17

  THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITH A PUSH, and the trail of rust-coloured milk ribbons into the near distance before coagulating round the sprawled figure of Captain Gully.

  His left arm lies crushed beneath him, and his stubby right arm is extended as though he were hailing a cab, and his eyes look straight at me, daring me to blink.

  He is still, still as fallen snow. Even his blood has ceased to agitate, and over the gaping flap of his neck, there remains only a dull red matte, which the cat gives a few disconsolate licks before moving on.

  All the other cats have vanished. Life itself has abandoned this space and left behind only husks. A pair of inert arms. A compacted torso. Two staring eyes.

  I’m on my knees now, with no memory of having knelt. I’m on my knees, and from my closed mouth issues a long, keening moan, the sort the wind makes when it scours round a chimney crown. The sound rises and falls, and my body rises and falls with it, until my hand, grasping for a brace, closes round something hard and wooden: a strand of beads, mashed in sections, with the paint nearly chapped off from fingering.

  Hail, Mary…Hail, Mary….

  No, it’s Philomela who knows the words, and she’s not here. My only litany is the sentence that flies round the circuits of my brain, in endless loops, forestalling the inevitable:

  O forgive me. O forgive me.

  The horror comes on all the same. The horror of that small definite incision across the carotid artery. The clean flat sharp blade that made it. I know that blade. I have seen it, I have seen the man who wields it. Nothing can shut them out.

  Minutes pass…years pass…the truth becomes only less assimilable. I lower my head towards Gully’s, I rest my forehead on his. The chill is almost enough to make me pull away, and yet there must be a residual heat, too, for I find I can linger there, at least until I look into his eyes, which are another story altogether—colder than any other part of him, and further away. It is the eyes that send the doleful news. Gully is gone.

  Best, kindest of men: gone.

  And now the fury gathers inside me, gathers and rises, hisses through my skin, and my mouth opens in anticipation of the scream to come, but it is only the same old litany, mumbled in Gully’s cold ear.

  O forgive me. O forgive me.

  Too bad: Gully’s power of dispensation has vanished with him. The words bounce off him like bent arrows.

  And yet, as I kneel there on the floor, I begin to feel, against all odds, a kind of benison at work, casting the room in a new slanting light, illuminating the mournful procession of Gully’s belongings. One by one, they pay their tribute: the Dutch clock, the tiny coal scuttle, the rope of privet over the door.

  And there, on the floor by Gully’s chair, one of his dog-eared atlases, still open.

  Why I should take the trouble of picking it up I can’t say. I already know what page it’s opened to. I can hear the good captain himself, invoking the olive groves and the stone towers and the coffee-skinned women…as if he were whispering in my ear. Just as he was whispering in her ear, probably, when they came for him.

  Majorca. You’ll see. Changes a man forever.

  The page tears off easily, and it rolls up even more easily, into a fife-size scroll. From there, it is simply a matter of turning Gully on his back—avoiding the face for the time being, avoiding the cambric shirt, with its strange diagonal sash of red, avoiding everything but the box wrench protruding from the cavity of his left arm.

  Into that wrench’s orifice I insert the scrolled-up map. I kneel, I murmur in Gully’s ear.

  —You may go anywhere you like now, Captain. The world is yours.

  But, as always, I am too late with my tidings. For Gully has quit this world, that becomes only more definite with each passing minute. Gully has flown to the next place, and left his chrysalis to rot here on the floor.

  And still some of him remains. It is oddly comforting to look down at my hands and find them smeared with the sticky residue of Gully’s blood. Not even the comforter will wipe them completely clean. In this way, in this way, I will carry Gully with me. And the longer I kneel by him, with one bloody hand on his brow, the more I believe I am travelling with him, escorting him into the next world.

  They will be glad to have him, I know, but what of me? What will they make of me? Nothing to do but send me back, to the ground of my sins.

  And already I hear the old world calling to me. A mewling sound that I attribute to Gully’s cats until it acquires a more human dimension, a plaintive timbre.

  Rising to my feet, I follow the sound—in circles, for it seems to be coming from all quadrants. And then, as my ears sharpen, the sound does, too. It settles in the far corner of Gully’s chamber, and as I approach, it concentrates into form: a small huddled shaking figure, head between its knees.

  Colin the unmelodious.

  To a true Christian gentleman,
I know, this would be an opportunity for solace. Why, then, does the sight of him inflame me with the whitest rage? Why, instead of laying a gentling hand on his shoulders, do I haul him straight up in the air and slam him against the wall?

  He is too far gone, fortunately, to be shocked. His eyes have winced shut, and his head drifts to port, and even the sound of my yelling cannot make much of a dent in him.

  —How long have you been here?

  I shake him, shake him hard, until the words come coughing out.

  —Don’t know.

  —Did you see it happen?

  —No.

  I grab his chin, force his head up. I glare into his waterlogged face.

  —You’re lying.

  —I stopped in, that’s all. Same as you.

  —You’re lying.

  —Honest, Mr. Timothy, I was—

  —What? What?

  —I was bringin’ ’em gifts.

  And then, from his limp hand, two bundles fall to the floor. A white handkerchief, trimmed with violet lace, and a miniature globe, two inches in diameter—the earth writ small.

  —They was for Christmas, like.

  His voice has a dying fall, and on any other day, I think, seeing him this way—so wholly stripped of his customary armour—would have thawed me. But not today. Today I am a column of ice.

  —Did you steal them, Colin?

  And this, oddly enough, is the very thing to prick him back into volubility.

  —It were my own money, I swear. I got lucky yesterday, bet on a prize cock with the money you gave me, and I was meanin’ to have a bit of a lark, it’s not often I get two quid….

  Such is the pitch of his hysteria I’m sure he would go on talking, all through the night and clear on to New Year’s, but for the realisation that stops his mouth in midmotion.

  —I didn’t need to go to that cockfight, Mr. Timothy. I oughta have come here ’stead. I oughta have been here….

  He sinks back to the floor, gouging the tears from his eyes.

  —God help me, I oughta have been here.

  —Why? So they might have killed you, too? How would that have served Gully?