The Ruffian on the Stair

by Gary Newman

  ‘Is that so?’ the man said, the smile that creased the pleasant, blunt features widening. ‘What was she, then?’

  ‘Oh,’ I hedged, fearing I’d already said too much, ‘she looks English to me.’

  ‘Enjoy!’ the puckish man said, still smiling, and with a nod walked briskly off.

  I looked at my watch: one-twenty already, and the gaseous lager and crisps had killed my appetite for lunch. I didn’t feel like traipsing round London in search of the other crosses on my grandfather’s street map, either – another day – so I made for the tube for Liverpool Street, en route home.

  That evening, Leah rang and invited me over to a pasta supper in her flat in the university grounds. I filled her in about the pre-war begging letter from Madame Pidgeon in Niort I’d found among Grandfather’s things on the Saturday evening, and without a word she got up and left the room. She came back and handed me a glossy brochure, which I held open at the folded-back page.

  ‘I took Mum to Leeds Art Gallery yesterday afternoon,’ Leah said, then, with a nod at the brochure I was holding: ‘They’ve a Rawbeck of their very own.’

  I took in the illustration in the brochure. It was a charcoal sketch of the back and legs of a beautiful young male body, contorted round a sort of blasted tree trunk. The face was invisible except for part of the jaw, the head being more or less absorbed into the tree trunk. The caption read: Sketch for Ariel Bound, and at the end of the short blurb: Model believed to have been the ‘L.V.P.’ associated with a number of other Rawbeck studies.

  ‘L.P.,’ I said, the penny dropping. ‘Laurent – Laurence – Pidgeon.’

  ‘Middle V. might be Victor, and pigeons are birds . . .’

  I recalled the later Paris entry in my grandfather’s notebook, about the ‘lounging, insolent Cockney’ who’d carried on with his Carrie, who’d pinched and possibly sold on his compromising Rawbeck sketches, and who’d figured in some horrifying revelation of Carrie’s at the time of their final break.

  ‘God!’ I whispered, the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. ‘The Vickybird’s back!’

  Chapter Four

  An article on new varieties of garden bamboo for the Dumfries Herald kept me away from the Jiffy bag mystery till Wednesday, when I found on rummaging through my files that I hadn’t the pics I needed to meet the delivery deadline. Groaning at the prospect of having to trundle up to London again to use the picture library, I took some comfort from the fact that at least I could press on there with sussing out the data in my grandfather’s old notebook and street plan.

  As I settled into my seat in the scruffy London pacer-train in Colchester station – thank God the morning rush-hour was long over – I reflected on how Leah’s turning-up of the Rawbeck sketch in the Leeds Art Gallery brochure had opened a whole new window on the affair. Now we were pretty sure we had the Vickybird in the frame. Odd how alive these characters still seemed, even after they’d been in the grave for so many decades. The ripples of my grandfather’s London nightmare in 1899, too, were proving wider than I might have thought, with possible continuing link-ups with Jersey and France.

  As the train rumbled free of Colchester I fished the old marbled notebook out of my inside pocket: what was the street where the magic mushroom session had taken place, before my grandfather had woken up beside the artist Rawbeck’s body in the room above the sleazy pub? Ah, that was it: Great College Street – ‘Convocation in Great College Street’ – it sounded positively ecclesiastical.

  I unfurled the 1871 street map, and noted that there was no pencilled cross marked anywhere along Great College Street, which I knew was behind the Houses of Parliament. Like the marked places I’d already visited on the Monday, the remaining three were clustered at points east of King’s Cross station, the farthest out in the Hackney Marsh district. Some sort of pattern to the cluster?

  By the time I’d finished my musings, the train was trundling into the refurbished gloom of Liverpool Street station, and, as soon as I’d got out, I made a beeline for the picture library where I needed to borrow the pics for my article. The business took half an hour, then I took a tube to Westminster.

  Armed with the squared-up, antique map, along with a modern street guide for reference, I made for Great Smith Street, and so down to the junction with Little Smith Street, then sharp left up the end of Tufton Street, to face the flint front of the Westminster School gate-surround at the head of Great College Street.

  I strolled slowly down the narrow street, the side opposite the school being taken up by, first, a red-brick, churchy-looking shop, whose windows revealed piled-up building materials inside. Next was the school Art Department – both buildings having a post-1914 look to them – before the discreet recess of Barton Street and its handsome Georgian houses. I paused and took in the side street – now, that was just the sort of place you’d have had a discreet little magic mushroom session in – then with a sigh reflected that, no, Grandfather had written Great College Street, and he must’ve known . . .

  I walked on in the direction of the river, across the opening to Barton Street, and came, more promisingly, to a block of eighteenth-century buildings, under refurbishment and still in Great College Street. Not a soul or a blue plaque in sight. Finally, I came to the opening to Little College Street, with, across the road, the lofty bulk of a Victorian building, the last in Great College Street not part of Westminster School. I crossed the street, to find that the building was a stately hotel, with, before it, the vast loom of the Big Ben clocktower, with the Thames at its foot. And that seemed to be it. Apart from the little assembly of Georgian houses under refurbishment before you hit the hotel at the end of the street, it was pretty clear that Westminster School now effectively occupied both sides. And again, even in 1899, it would have been a pretty high-profile area to have held Diabolist sessions in; unless some of the Diabolists had been MPs or clergymen.

  I turned my back on the Mother of Parliaments, and, crossing to the other side of Great College Street, thoughtfully retraced my steps. They’d have detailed OS maps of Victorian London in the new public library in Westminster Town Hall, I mused, and made my way to Victoria Street. There, I found that at the time of Julian Rawbeck’s disappearance in 1899 there’d in fact been two Great College Streets, the one I’d just visited, and one – named after the Royal Veterinary College – in the Camden Town area. Looking in my modern street guide, I saw that the Camden Town alternative now went under the name of Royal College Street. The district had a certain resonance, too, for hadn’t my grandfather mentioned in his notebook that Julian Rawbeck had had a studio on Camden Hill?

  Spurred on now by the thrill of the chase, I made for the tube again, and Camden Town station. Not knowing that part of London very well, I got out at the Camden High Street exit instead of the one at the back which gave on to Kentish Town Road, and so blundered about for a while in the sleazy Gothland round Inverness Street market. Using my modern street guide, I jostled my way through the throng of young tourists, trendseekers and oddbods like myself until I’d found my bearings amid the grubby tat of the gorblimey fascias under the crumbling, Regency-looking upper storeys.

  Having reorientated myself, I crossed the canal at Starbuck’s, curved up Castlehaven and Hawley Roads, and faced the roaring confluence with Kentish Town Road and Camden Street, which ran parallel with Royal College Street.

  Yes, I could cross the street here and use the side street on the other side as a short cut to Royal College Street. I took my life in my hands and nipped across, then took the pavement of the genteel side street – Jeffreys Street – that led down to the head of Royal College Street.

  Jeffreys Street had nice, Regency-looking terrace houses on both sides, two-storeyed, cream-painted on the ground-floor walls, with ironwork grilles under the upper windows and the original iron railings round the areas. Barriers at either end shut the street off from school- and rat-runners, as well as from the roaring traffic on the two parallel thoroughfares.


  By then I’d almost reached the opening to Royal College Street – so far, so . . . but hang on . . . there was a commemorative plaque on the wall of one of the cream-painted houses at the end of Jeffreys Street: Sir Tarquin Rivers, traveller and writer, lived here, 1893–1899. 1899 again, and Rivers rang a bell. I tried to remember as I walked on, but couldn’t quite make the connection: it’d come to me later on, no doubt.

  There’s quite a lot of Royal College Street, and whatever dingy romance my grandfather might have found there in its gaslit and cab-belled days has long since dissipated amid the roaring utilitarianism of the modern streetscape. A weary succession of rundown Victorian terraces till you crossed the canal at Lyme Street, then, on the hospital side, the Brutalist rash of the Parcelforce depot, then more Victorian blight, with nary a mark or plaque on either side to give me a scent of my youthful grandfather’s world. Then, on the last crumbling house-but-one on the hospital side . . .

  I crossed the road at the zebra crossing and viewed the front of the house: unaltered from Victorian times, for all I could see, except for the concrete sills of the windows of the upper storeys. Sash window frames with catches on the central bars, a battered door with a grotty area down on its right, and there, on the blistered, buff wall between two windows, a square wooden plaque with the words: The French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud lived here May–July 1873. The adjoining house, just before the gateway to the car park of the Beaumont Animal Hospital, marked the end of the road for my purposes, and I made my way to the bus stop in Crowndale Road.

  While I waited for the bus that would take me to King’s Cross, en route to Liverpool Street, and so home with the pics that would enable me to meet the deadline for my article that day, I went over my impressions. Verlaine and Rimbaud had been the Punk Poets of their time, into all sorts of now-illegal substances, and hadn’t Rimbaud dealt with synaesthesia in his poetry? The name given to interchange of sense impressions: smelling sounds, tasting colours etc. ‘Correspondances’, I think he’d called them. My grandfather had recorded just such impressions in his description in his notebook of the effects of his having imbibed the magic mushroom potion. I felt I was on the right track.

  An hour later, I was seated in the train home, and I pulled out Grandfather’s notebook and went over the entries again, mulling over the fantastic story he told.

  Briefly, in the autumn or winter – he describes the London air then as ‘raw’, and it was established that Rawbeck had disappeared in the November – of 1899, he becomes involved with a bohemian group based in Great College Street – as it was then called – in Camden. Whose house it is isn’t stated, but Rawbeck is clearly calling the shots. Also present is a ‘queen’ called Toland, whose ‘credit’ Rawbeck enjoys, and who slobbers over my youthful grandfather. There’s also a ‘P. F.’, who obliges with a dirge on the flute. There’s a sense that there are others present, too, but with no details as to their identity, which suggests that my forebear was writing up the notes for his own reference.

  At the session, young Sebastian is chosen as ‘Seer’, who through the medium of a magic mushroom potion will presumably provide mystic revelations for the rest of the ‘Convocation’. My grandfather is undergoing this, and other ordeals, for the sake of access to Carrie Bugle, a girl from the music halls, access that can only be attained through the artist, Julian Rawbeck, whose model Carrie is.

  After the ‘Convocation’, my grandfather makes his way – or is escorted – semi-conscious and hallucinating, into a hansom cab, from which he’s decanted, unconscious, into the upper room of a pub in some rough area of London, somewhere with ‘water on his left’. The young man comes to, naked, on a dingy bed, and, while dressing, stumbles over the body of Julian Rawbeck, the latter’s throat cut. My grandfather flees the room, apparently unobserved, in the early hours of the morning and, on leaving the pub, clocks a charismatic red-and-blue stained-glass edging to the window of the landing. He reaches his digs, and on packing hurriedly for the Continent, notices that his razor’s missing.

  Young Sebastian Rolvenden then heads for Paris, where he’s joined by music hall girl and artist’s model Carrie, now free of her Svengali, Rawbeck. But Carrie has a fancy man in attendance, the racily nicknamed ‘Vickybird’, possibly the Laurent or Laurence Pidgeon whose French wife Odette a generation later will send a begging letter from Niort in France to my grandfather in his Jersey vicarage.

  In Paris, Carrie and the Vickybird batten on my grandfather, until, sometime in the following year, 1900, the Vickybird steals some drawings that are somehow of great significance to Grandfather, and possibly sells them on to a Paris art dealer, Carbonero. There’s some link-up with the Roman numeral LXXXIII.

  Meanwhile, Grandfather and Carrie, who’s now increasingly drunken and ‘blowsy’, as well as pregnant, come to the parting of the ways, but not before she’s horrified him with some unspecified revelation about the fate of Rawbeck. My grandfather makes arrangements for the coming child, while Cecily, his long-suffering fiancée in England, comes into her majority-money and comes over to Paris to take him away from all that. So ended the notebook entries.

  I laid the notebook in my lap and looked out of the compartment window: the train was skirting the A12, and would soon be coming into Hatfield Peverel. But how much of my grandfather’s account had been true, how much hallucination or, as Leah suggested, psychological bogeymen induced by guilt feelings? As for what had happened in the real world after the notebook entries, Cecily paid for Grandfather’s ordination course at Cambridge, he set up as a parson, and they married and produced my father, Athelstan Hugh Rolvenden – ‘A. H.’ to all and sundry. For my grandfather there’d followed a blameless life as a clergyman, first in Cambridge, then in Jersey, and finally at Malmesbury, where he’d died in 1950, in a house owned by Nanny’s family, the Woodruffs.

  But happy ever afterwards? I hardly think so: the impression I’d got was that my grandfather had passed the rest of his life in a sort of haunted unease, which seemed to have been visited on my own father, ‘A.H.’, who’d appeared to go constantly apologizing through life. Dad had been sandy-haired and shy, and had passed his days quietly as an aircraft designer at Calshot. He’d only married at forty-three, and my mother, who’d been a bookshop assistant in Harrogate when he was conducting an army course in a nearby country house during the war, did a bunk in 1958, when I was six. She’d been dark and vivacious – as sociable as Dad had been shy – with brown eyes and a snub nose, and had worn her wavy hair like the Rank Charm School film starlets of the day.

  Dad hadn’t been able to cope with me – too busy, for one thing: he was a technical director at Calshot by then – and had simply bunged me into a series of boarding schools. He’d never remarried, and had remained quietly shrugging his shoulders – ‘Search me, old lad . . .’ – and smoking his pipe till he’d died in 1971. If I’d had to invent an epitaph for him, I think it would have been: ‘He kept his head down.’

  The train pulled out of Hatfield Peverel, and I returned to the battered notebook in my lap. I opened it again, this time at the page with the enigmatic, disjointed entries: Rivers – Home in the East – Soundings A. But which rivers? The Seine? The Thames? Whose Home in the East? And Soundings A had more of the ring of a recording studio than something from way back in 1900. And where was Reuben’s Court, if not in prosaic, too-modern Gunnersbury Park? And Smoking Altars? These would have to be tackled methodically, one at a time.

  Then at least one penny dropped: Rivers. The name on the plaque on the house in Jeffreys Street, the one that led into Great College Street. Not a river, but a man. Could the Rivers in the notebook have been Tarquin Rivers, who’d been a traveller and writer, and who’d left the house in Camden in 1899, the year of Julian Rawbeck’s disappearance?

  I was too impatient to wait till I got home to look it up on the Internet, so as soon as the train pulled into Colchester, I reclaimed my car from the station car park and made for the reference library and their
past numbers of Who’s Who. The 1913 edition had the most complete summing-up of Rivers’ life, for it had been in that year that he’d died of typhoid at Homs in Syria. Born in 1865 into an army family near Croscomb in Somerset, Tarquin Soane Rivers had been educated at Wellington, then had gone up to Balliol to take a First in Arabic and Persian before joining the Sudan Civil Service – ‘Blues ruling Blacks’ – in 1887. In 1891 he’d resigned ‘somewhat abruptly’ from the Service in order to indulge his lifelong passion for travel in the ‘desert places of the world’, basing himself loosely in London during the brief intervals between journeys. A lifelong bachelor, he’d published four collections of sonnets and numerous travel books before his death.

  It wasn’t a long entry in Who’s Who, so I made for the non-fiction department, to find that they’d a collection of poems by Rivers in the reserve stack. It was called Baalbek, and I got the girl to dig it out for me. When she had, I went over to a seat and skimmed through the slim volume, the Introduction giving me the gist of where the writer was coming from: A minor poet, whose marked individuality and subjectivity of theme did not recommend him to the coteries of his day, Rivers gives the fullest expression to his enigmatic genius in his haunting, almost hallucinatory evocations of the landscapes and cultures of the Levant. In more than one of these sonnets, Rivers’ explorations of the theme of unattainable, ‘distant’ love clearly evoke the Amor de lonh of the medieval troubadour Rudel, as does his skilful use of the Arabic convention of the ghazal, in which the true identity of the adored object – often of the same sex as the writer – is hidden among virtuoso conceits. Among the poems gathered here, there is a peculiarly elusive quality to the sonnet ‘Baalbek’, first fruit of Rivers’ last oriental period after he left England forever in 1899 . . .

  That year again! When the Camden Convocation – along with Julian Rawbeck – had so abruptly vanished. I glanced at my watch, remembering that I still had pics to process and an article to email, so just read the flagship sonnet ‘Baalbek’ as a taster. It was all about deserts, heart’s desires and the Oasis that must always dissolve as in a mirage. I remembered the old Piaf number, ‘Mon Légionnaire’: ‘He was thin, he was handsome, he smelt good – of the hot sand.’ Who’d Rivers’ legionnaire been? Whose male identity had he covered up in the Arabic conceits of the sonnet? With a final glance at my watch – I was cutting it thin, now – I flicked back the pages to the Dedication at the front. It was only four letters, and there flashed through my mind the image of a lonely, sand-blown cairn of stones in the middle of an endless desert as I took the words in. They read simply: To S. R.