The Ruffian on the Stair

by Gary Newman

  ‘My father told me once that my grandfather, Philippe, had told him she came from Broome, but did not say much more about her, except that she drank a lot – when life is hard, one must have something – and was not polite.’

  ‘And,’ I pressed, ‘I suppose your father would’ve been too young really to have known your great-grandmother, Carrie?’

  ‘He was only aged three years when she died in 1933. The alcoholism . . .’

  I sighed as the realization of what Carrie Bugle’s later life had been passed through my mind: it was all too clear. But, as for her origins: Broome?

  ‘Lord knows how many place names there are in Britain with variants of “broom” in them.’ I voiced my doubts as to this aspect.

  The French visitor spread his hands again.

  ‘Don’t I know it . . . You cannot help me, then, Mr Rolvenden?’

  ‘Not at the moment, but if anything comes my way, how can I contact you?’

  ‘My plans are very, er . . . changeable at the moment, perhaps you could . . .’

  I fumbled in my jacket for a business card with my contact details – better a phone call than waking up to more seaweed stinks in the sitting room . . . The long Frenchman took the card, then we got up. There was another round of handshakes, and we put on our outside things.

  ‘May I say again, Mr Rolvenden, what a pleasure to meet the grandson of a benefactor of my family! We must keep in touch.’

  I nodded without too much enthusiasm.

  ‘Now,’ Ramier said, ‘I think I shall call on Mr Frank Hague the antiquaire.’

  We moved to the door, then parted on the pavement.

  ‘Au revoir, Mr Rolvenden.’

  I gave an absorbed parting nod before making for my car, but my mind was engrossed by what this Ramier had just told me. ‘Broome . . .’ I muttered out loud, as the Frenchman’s car roared away in the distance. Then the penny dropped, and I stopped in my tracks and roared with laughter. To a French ear, ‘Broome’ was what Carrie’s ‘Brum’ would’ve sounded like: Miss Bugle had been from Birmingham . . .

  The first thing I thought of was the Family Records Centre in Islington: did I have time for a quick trip up to London? I was up to schedule with the film bio and I could catch up with whatever might be in my Inbox after tea, burning the midnight oil, if necessary. In view of this godsend that had just fallen into my lap, I could hardly see how I could resist making the trip.

  Settled, then, but first – before I forgot – I’d have to pop into the stationer’s in Colchester to lay in a fresh stock of printer paper. I always forgot printer paper if I left it to the journey back. This little detour didn’t take long, but as I drove away from the stationer’s in the nearby provincial centre, something caught my eye among the shops: a white fascia with The Triada Health Club in blue lettering. It seemed to signify something, somehow – not the name, but the colour scheme, perhaps. And hadn’t Pat Hague, I mused, been in tracksuit and trainers – health-club gear – when she’d buttonholed Leah at the filling station on Saturday morning with her mysterious provocation about Leah’s Guardian letter?

  Such fleeting impressions, however, were soon driven from my mind by the impact made on it by what Ramier had just told me. First of all, I didn’t believe for a moment that the Frenchman had simply swanned over the Channel for a holiday themed round a search for his English roots. For one thing, he’d claimed to be a hotelier – presumably in a modest way of business – in Berneval, but, in view of the fact that the holiday season was just getting under way, it was a funny time to take a break. Then, by Ramier’s own admission, the Rawbeck print at the auction we’d both attended in Walberswick had had some connection with his family tree. I didn’t buy his just having happened to spot the lot advertised on some website or other.

  And what lay behind Reet’s confab with him that morning? Above all, why had she been in such a rage, both on entering the guest house Ramier had been staying in in Southwold, and on leaving it after the interview? Scarcely the response you’d have expected to a friendly chat about genealogy . . . And she’d been after the bloody Rawbeck print of what looked my grandfather and the other model, too! It occurred to me: what if the other young man in the sketch had been modelled by the Vickybird? I felt as if I were fighting some sort of duel in a darkened cellar . . .

  These speculations accompanied me all the way to the Family Records Centre in London, where I traced Carrie Bugle through the 1881 Census to Birmingham: Castle Bromwich Workhouse, to be precise, in the orphanage of which she’d been dumped in 1877. No doubt the Master of the workhouse – in the tradition of Oliver Twist – had assigned a surname to her associated with her immediate discovery. Perhaps the catsmeat man had been around with his bugle when she’d been discovered. Despite the way she’d conned and cozened my grandfather in Paris, I began to feel for Carrie: ‘to know everything is to forgive everything . . .’ Well, maybe I’d leave a question mark at the end of that adage for the moment.

  Further along, there was no record of her in the 1891 Census, either for Birmingham or London, nor did she appear in the one for 1901, so I assumed she’d been on her travels from the age of fourteen or so, and had fetched up in London after the 1891 Census had been taken. Then a meteoric career on the music halls and as an artist’s model, with Julian Rawbeck as her Svengali. She’d fled after my grandfather to Paris after Rawbeck’s disappearance in 1899, followed shortly afterward by the Vickybird, so that would explain her absence from the 1901 Census.

  It looked as if, like the Vickybird, Carrie had stayed permanently out of England, unless you counted her stay, with her son, Philippe, under my grandfather’s protection in Jersey from 1921 to 1925, as residence in England. Knowing Nanny Rolvenden, she’d have taken even the overwhelming Carrie in her stride. And did Carrie’s arrival on the island prompt Nanny to carry out her suggestion in her acceptance letter to Grandfather’s proposal of marriage that, one day, they’d both read through the confessions in his little notebook?

  I pictured the young Sebastian Rolvenden the First in 1900, living the vie de Bohème in Paris, swooning over Carrie’s stale blouse, with the Vickybird stealing a slice off the loaf whenever his back’s turned . . . But it was the bare bones of Carrie’s life that stirred me: dumped on the steps of a workhouse as soon as she’s born, out on to the streets at fourteen, then a brief glow of glory on the halls – Gatti’s, with ‘Tom Tinsley in the Chair!’ – followed by a sort of immortality on Rawbeck’s canvas, then murder and horror, with flight to Paris, and a child by my grandfather.

  Afterwards, after he’s left her for comfort and respectability in England, her long, booze-fuelled decline: a mismatch with a Frenchman, another child, then she kills her husband, followed by jail, then temporary refuge with my grandfather again in Jersey, then back after her son to France, and more booze amid the poverty that, like an untreated toothache, never leaves her, until death wraps its white cocoon round her at the age of fifty-six. But Carrie was by no means finished with me yet . . .

  ‘You look lost – need any help with the computer?’

  This from a thin young staffer in shirtsleeves, with a shaven skull and ginger bristles at the sides, and keen, helpful eyes behind thickish specs. I shall remember him . . .

  ‘Er, no . . .’ I said, startled out of my reverie. ‘Just that I’ve discovered something a bit disconcerting.’

  ‘Tracing your family line?’

  ‘You could say that – indirectly.’

  The young man’s next statement had a hint in it of the confidential, as well as the professional – he clearly liked his job.

  ‘It sounds obvious,’ he went on, ‘but you’d be surprised how many people jump a generation or two when they’re researching their family histories. They think they know all there is to be known about, say, their grandparents, so they tend to skip that generation, and often even that of their parents, which is a mistake.’

  Of course it had been Carrie Bugle I’d been after on this occasion,
but the assistant’s remarks fitted my case, too – during my occasional researches into my grandfather in the past, I’d always started automatically with him. Nearer home, I don’t think I’d ever even seen my own rather colourless father’s birth certificate. I didn’t know, for instance, whether you had to produce someone’s birth certificate to register their death, and in Dad’s case his old pal Bill Wallace in Lympne had had to do the necessary when he’d died suddenly in 1971 while staying with Bill. At the time, I’d been backpacking in Crete.

  Come to think of it, I was rather hazy as to exactly where Dad had been born: I’d always assumed it had been in Cambridge, where my grandparents had settled after Sebastian the First’s arrival back from Paris in 1900 to read for ordination as a parson. Grandfather had had his first curacy in Cambridge, too. Just for the record, it might be interesting to know where Dad had been born . . .

  ‘I’d like to start with my father,’ I said to the helpful assistant. ‘He was born in 1900 – in Cambridge, I think.’

  The young man showed me the ropes, and I started off, drawing blanks at Cambridge and the ecclesiastical rookery of Ely, seventeen miles away. Nor had the London Registries of the day known the infant A.H. Rolvenden. I caught the eye of the helpful assistant again, and he came back over to me. I explained the impasse I was in.

  ‘Any record of foreign service in your family at the time?’ he suggested. ‘Armed services? British Empire?’

  ‘His father – my grandfather – was a clergyman, actually.’

  ‘Mmm . . . missions abroad – some postings were quite short. Does your family have any strong connection with a foreign country?’

  ‘Not unless you count the Channel Islands as “foreign” . . . My grandfather’s mother was a Jersey girl, but to my knowledge, neither of my grandparents had any contact with the island until my grandfather went out there as a clergyman in 1919. He’d served as an army padre in France during the 1914 war, but apart from that, there was no foreign connection, unless, of course . . .’

  ‘Yes? Go on.’

  ‘My grandfather was an art student in Paris in the 1890s, and didn’t come back to England till the spring of 1900.’

  ‘Ah, right . . . If your grandparents were in France at the time, your father’s birth may have been registered at the British Embassy in Paris.’

  ‘Have you records of that here?’

  ‘We do – let’s see . . .’

  When the assistant had come up with the information, he didn’t seem a bit surprised by the gasp I couldn’t help giving out – he must have seen so many such reactions before on the part of searchers like myself.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ the young man said quietly, as the bluish light of the computer screen was reflected by the lenses of his glasses, making him look like a hatless alchemist. ‘It’s always interesting to start at the beginning.’

  ‘Interesting,’ was hardly the word to describe my reaction, as I sat there, trying to adjust to the information on the cyberspace image of the copy of the handwritten entry, and trying to take in its full implications. But there it all was, inescapable: Sebastian John Rolvenden, aged twenty-five and described as a ‘theological student’, had indeed registered the birth of his son, Athelstan Hugh Rolvenden, at the British Embassy in Paris on 11th August 1900, the mother’s name being given as Caroline Ann Bugle, aged twenty-three and described as ‘of no occupation’.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Once outside the Family Records Office again, I made my way thoughtfully down Myddelton Street in search of my car. The preoccupied London faces on the street wore much the same expressions, but I felt I’d come out of the Centre a different Seb Rolvenden from the one who’d gone in. So the ‘arrangements’ my grandfather had made for Carrie’s child had included his going with her – what did one wear to register offices in 1900? – to the British Embassy in Paris, and having it put on record that he was the father.

  And this child – my father-to-be, ‘A.H.’ – hadn’t been spirited away afterwards, hole-in-corner fashion, to some orphanage, but taken to England to be brought up by Grandfather and Nanny Rolvenden as their son. At that moment, as I walked the indifferent London pavement, Nanny’s high-nosed face, with its confident smile, appeared in my mind’s eye. To have taken on Dad as her own like that – what a woman! My already-high esteem for her had now shot sky-high. All right, I now knew she hadn’t been my grandmother in the biological way, but love had its rights and title deeds, too, and by that token, I felt Nanny had been more my grandmother than ever!

  Then there’d been Nanny’s cryptic remark about me in the garden in Malmesbury when I was six, to the effect that ‘the issue had been good’ – I saw that remark in a new light, now. God bless her!

  But back to Dad – how had this background affected him? He must’ve been told about his origins, because for one thing, he’d have needed his birth certificate for his first passport, but not a word to me about it . . . God! I still couldn’t take it in – I was Carrie Bugle’s grandson! And when Carrie had come back into my grandfather’s ken when she’d sought refuge, with her son by her French marriage, under his protection in Jersey in 1921, how had my staid young design-draughtsman father taken it? Though he’d already started his career in England, he must’ve come over occasionally in the holidays to visit Grandfather and Nanny in Jersey. Or had he? I mustn’t think in twenty-first-century terms: such a meeting would’ve been socially impossible for Nanny, and if the situation had become known, it would have meant the end of Grandfather’s career in the Church. No: some sort of pretext must have been cooked up, and Carrie and her son sworn to secrecy. I wonder, though, whether Carrie, Dad’s real mother, had ever yearned to see her firstborn again? They were all silent now . . .

  But what tension there must have been in the vicarage, and what relief for Grandfather and Nanny when Philippe had got his French call-up papers, and Carrie had eventually followed him back to France. And then, a couple of years later, in 1927, my grandfather gets the hard-luck letter from the wife of the old thorn in his flesh – the Vickybird. All Sebastian would have needed to complete his unease would have been the appearance of the ghost of Rawbeck, Jacob Marley-like, with a gap where his throat should have been!

  I sat in the car for a good five minutes, mulling things over in my mind, before deciding on my next move. It was just four o’clock, and now I was in London I thought I might as well check up, from the coded verses in Tarquin Rivers’ poem ‘The Burial of the Magus’, the details of how he’d disposed of Julian Rawbeck’s body. Bethnal Green station would be as good a starting-off point as any for the nearby Jews’ Burial Ground. I drove off, weaving eastwards through the growing traffic, and found a parking space fairly easily near the station, but I sensed that it wasn’t the sort of place to park in for too long . . .

  I got out, and the walk in the fresh air did me good at first, but the gritty shabbiness of the East End soon got to me, and I felt my spirits sink as I emerged into the green space that was all that was left of the old cemetery. The most outstanding inscriptions there were the graffiti, gibberish of blown-out minds, and the only votive offerings on view plastic carrier bags, discarded pizza boxes, plastic bottles, stray trainers and worse.

  I looked around me: besides Brady Street, the only thoroughfare of any size was parallel Collingwood Street. Of the 1899 Reuben Street – disguised as Reuben’s Court in Rivers’ poem – there was now no trace, nor was there anything on the ground to mark where the Animal Charcoal Works – source of the Undying Smoke in the poem about the Magus – had stood. What had I expected after more than a century?

  I turned round and went back up Brady Street again, recapitulating the narrative hidden in Rivers’ poem as I walked. It’s the night, then, of 11th November 1899, and Rivers is watching, unobserved, on the side of the road that faces the East Hackney pub where Rawbeck’s body is found. Rivers witnesses the comings and goings that confirm his suspicions that my grandfather’s being set up for what’s happene
d upstairs. He sees the four conspirators in the caper leave the pub – the way I read it, on the actual night Rivers would have seen my grandfather stagger out afterwards, too, but for obvious reasons omits this from the poem.

  Well, then: Rivers, unable to wait any longer, rushes up to the murder room to find the artist’s dead body, but no Sebastian Rolvenden. He decides to put his beloved ‘S.R.’ in the clear by disposing of Rawbeck’s corpse, which, from the mention of ‘ash’ in the poem, he does by some form of cremation. First of all, though, he’s got to get the artist’s body out of the room, on to the landing with the stained-glass window, and down the staircase to the street. Ways and means . . .

  I knew that Rivers was an ex-army man and an explorer in high-risk regions of the world, so I assumed he was pretty able-bodied; even so, Rawbeck was fairly hefty himself, and without an accomplice, how could Rivers possibly have carried his – literally – dead weight out of the pub and away unobserved?

  Ah! But there’d have been at least one potential accomplice at the head of every street in London at the time – late-night cabbies . . . Rivers would have been used to blood and gore from his army days, so it’s no great ordeal for him to tidy up the corpse, muffle a scarf round the lacerated neck, and ram the hat over the head. Gloves, too, would hide the coldness of the dead man’s hands.

  Rivers then checks that the way’s clear, nips out and whistles up a cab: ‘Gentleman upstairs has had one-overthe-eight, cabbie – I’ll dash you an extra florin if you’ll come up and help me down with him and get him into the cab . . .’ Routine for the cabbie, and in the dark and murk of a late-autumn night he’d have neither the visibility nor the incentive to examine the tipsy, unconscious gent too closely. It would have needed nerve on Rivers’ part, of course, but his life had been one long risk . . .

  That left me with the little matter of exactly how Rivers would have cremated Rawbeck’s corpse without arousing too much attention – a fire would have had to be arranged . . . Where better to find out what fires had been laid on that night in the East End than in the columns of the archive issues of the East London Advertiser? As soon as I’d got into my car again – and not without a little sigh of relief that it was still there and in one piece – I drove to Tower Hamlets Local History Library and got them to rustle up the microfiched numbers of the Advertiser for November 1899. I found what I wanted in the 12th November issue – just a single paragraph, under the title: Fatal Fire in Pereira Street: