Sweet Thames

by Matthew Kneale

  ‘When you’re done then. It’s not far, and I’ll be there all afternoon.’

  More time taken up, and I had been hoping to do some work on my diagram of an Effluent Depository. How very like Sweet to secure every ounce of return on his help to me; the sense of payment owed that marked a good businessman. But I could hardly feel resentment in view of the considerable assistance he had provided. ‘I’ll join you as soon as I’m finished.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He was turning to leave when Jem tugged at his sleeve. ‘Give us a shilling, mister, give us a shilling.’

  I would have expected a man such as Sweet to brush away the urchin with no more ceremony than he would an insolvent eager for molasses. To my surprise he paused, bent down and examined the lad’s face with a certain interest, as a clever-eyed bear discovering the puzzle of a succulent creature hard to extract from its hole. ‘And why do you ask me for a shilling?’

  Jem’s face took on a look of piteous woe. ‘For to eat, mister, for to eat some poor morsel of some’it.’

  Sweet glanced up at Grant and myself with a knowing look, as a showman to his audience. ‘But if I give you a shilling,’ he continued to the boy, ‘would I be helping you?’

  Jem seemed to regard the question as hardly worth answering. ‘’Course you would.’

  ‘What would you do after you had spent the shilling, eh? More begging, I dare say.’

  ‘P’raps.’

  Sweet regarded the boy with lively benignity. ‘But if I give you nothing, you’d be forced, from need, to find yourself employment. Once working you could find yourself somewhere to live. Then rise to a higher position, perhaps, and altogether better your miserable life.’ He glanced from Jem to myself with the air of having conjured up a white rabbit and several doves. ‘So it’s kinder by far, you’ll agree, if I give nothing. That way I’ll not further pauperize you.’

  Jem regarded him sullenly, with the look of one who has wasted good time. ‘Too late, i’n it? I been pauperized already.’

  ‘Tchaa, tchaa.’ Sweet shook his head.’ There’s a lesson for you here, boy. An important one, that you’d be wise to study well. Charity is a dangerous thing. It’s a belief I...’

  Further enlargement of his views was interrupted, however. Hayle, whom I had dimly observed from the corner of my eye fumbling in his pockets, uttered a shout. ‘Two half-crowns clean gone. He’s had them, the little bugger.’

  ‘I never did, I never did.’ Despite his words, the urchin took the precaution of dropping my jacket on the mud and stepping nimbly back several paces.

  ‘Catch him, catch him,’ Hayle demanded, striding after the boy.

  There seemed little other option, and Grant and myself joined him in giving chase. Indeed, I did so with some spirit, more than a little angered that the boy – whom I had tried to encourage, to educate in the important world of drainage research, in which he had feigned interest – should now reward me by stealing from my servant, by showing me up in front of my most useful helper. I felt nothing less than betrayed.

  In the event, however, catching him proved no easy matter. Jem proved well adept at traversing the slippery surface of the Thames bank – no landscape for speed – and while Grant, Hayle and myself found ourselves sliding and falling in the vile slime, the boy managed to spring lightly away. By the time we had reached the shore he had quite vanished into the maze of leaning houses beyond.

  We trudged slowly back to the sewer outlet. Sweet had not joined in the pursuit, and seemed magically neat and clean compared with the rest of us, caked as we were with greygreen Thames mud. ‘What was I saying, before we were interrupted?’ He regarded us with rhetorical knowingness. ‘I think it was how charity can be a dangerous thing.’

  As I worked on the Great Drainage Map of London, inking in black circles to represent suggested locations for the Effluent Transformational Depositories, my eyes several times lit upon the four letters lodged so cheeringly on the edge of my desk. Four acceptances. Sweet’s, of course, was no surprise, and likewise Albert Farre – whom I had decided also to invite, that I might have present another soul close to my own age – had already told me of his intention to come to the dinner. But what of Edwin Sleak-Cunningham? The great man of drainage reform to come to my own house, to take his dinner in my own dining-room, and learn of my ideas. A wonderful triumph indeed. Ever since his letter had arrived I had been filled with restless hope, with impatience at my having chosen as the date of the event an evening still some days distant.

  In addition to Sleak-Cunningham, Hove had also written to tell of his acceptance, though his message arrived after that of his senior, leading me to suspect his bureaucratic soul had been guided by a spirit of emulation rather than a wish himself to attend. All would bring their wives except Farre – who had none to bring – and it promised to be a large occasion indeed, with nine at table.

  I hoped they would not be taken aback when I began delivering my account of the System of Effluent Transformational Depositories. I had not over-stressed the lecture element on the invitations, adding merely a handwritten postscript on each, to the effect that I hoped to use the evening to explain a little about the scheme. Probably there would be a certain surprise when I stood up to speak, notes in hand. I comforted myself, however, that the subject was such a lively one that, once embarked upon, the guests would be too swiftly captivated by the dazzling notions to disapprove of my methods.

  The formalities of the evening also troubled me a little. I had no great knowledge of dinner etiquette, but supposed the best time to begin the lecture would be after the meal had been consumed, when the ladies retired to chatter amongst themselves. Indeed this was the only possible moment, as the matter was hardly suitable for female ears. I worried, however, that this would allow me little time properly to explain my ideas. There was so much to tell, and it would be nothing short of catastrophic to misuse such a God-given opportunity. If necessary the ladies would simply have to wait rather longer than was traditional before again joining us. An hour or two. Longer even.

  The early summer dawn had just begun to break outside, and the house opposite my study window, normally coloured a smoke-darkened grey, was lit a deep and splendid blue. I had not intended to stay working all through the night, but now that it had happened I wondered if it were not a cunningly good way of arranging things. I was tired of course – I could feel the weariness in my limbs, the fogginess of thought as I rose from my desk and stole quietly from the room – but had I not progressed some distance, if slowly and a shade untidily, on the drawing of my Drain Map? Also, by remaining awake I had avoided the risk of further troubling nightmares.

  A faint growling emanated from Isobella’s room – Pericles had heard my passing – followed by a rustling sound, and I hoped I had not woken my wife. In the kitchen I prepared myself coffee, and collected upon a plate several large potatoes, a swede, and the remainder of a leg of pork. Really I should not eat so much, I knew – lately my stomach had begun to swell, as if I had become a keen drinker of beer – but the hunger within me never seemed to abate. In addition, eating helped keep me awake.

  I felt myself relax as I reached the parlour, lay back on the easy chair and began devouring my dawn meal. I wondered if I should not spend more time in this room, perhaps even work here. The study was growing increasingly uncomfortable to me; even when I had no intention to sleep there was always the risk that unconsciousness would steal up on me. Thus only the previous night I had come awake slumped at my desk, hot with perspiration at having stabbed to death both Moynihan and Sweet.

  Indeed, there seemed no limit as to whom I might now murder, having variously done to death Miss Symes, Gerald Prowse, Mr Willow, Hayle, both Gideon and Felicia Lewis, Hove, the Reverend Michael Bowrib, Barrett the butler, and even several people whom I had never even met but only read of in The Times, including William McReady the actor, Carlyle the great historian, and Prince Metternich, deposed helmsman of the Habsburg Empire. Only the weapon remained constant
– the knife I had given my wife – causing me to wonder if I should try to remove it as I had the last. There was little opportunity; Isobella had of late been much engaged upon her embroidery, and seemed to carry it constantly with her. Also she was bound to be most curious at a second such disappearance.

  The light filtering by the curtains told of sunrise well under way, and I could hear the first stirrings into life of this new metropolitan day. Pulling the curtains back, I watched a nightsoil cart clatter slowly past, doubtless just finished with emptying some household cesspool. The sight called to my mind a finely motivating piece I had read – it had been only the morning before, although it already seemed several days distant – in one of the monthly journals, in which a writer by the name of Dr Kelvin had conclusively proved how, were London not rapidly provided with a proper sewerage system, its central areas would vanish quite away beneath a rising tide of effluent.

  The logic Kelvin had used had been the unalterable laws of economics. The drainage of the metropolis being presently so defective, he had pointed out, a great part of metropolitan nightsoil was removed in carts, such as I had just watched pass by, in which it was carried to rural areas to be sold to farmers. As London grew, however – which it never ceased to do – the distance these vehicles were required to journey would increase, until a point would be reached when the substances would have to be transported too far to offer profit. Nightsoil traders would be forced to abandon their work, and at once evil deposits would begin to build up in the streets. Logically, such a process could only lead to one result.

  Contemplate, if you will, the creeping catastrophe that will be brought thus upon ourselves. Day by day the vilenesses will grow in slow accumulation; first rising in depth upon streets until vehicles and horses find themselves ever mired; next blocking stairways and the doors to houses that their inhabitants cannot enter or depart; finally reaching so high that the central parts of London – the hub of enterprise and government of our great city – will be as some desert, palaces, Inns of Court, offices of great companies, the architecture itself, all vanishing from sight beneath the tide of evil.

  Powerful reasoning, I considered, getting up from my seat, the potatoes and swede dealt with and the leg of pork reduced to bone. In the light of such argument could even the most fanatical anti-governmentalist seriously resist the call for revolutionary rebuilding of the sewers? I shook my head as I left the parlour and retraced my steps towards the kitchen, catching sight, en route, of Miss Symes’s unexpected form, perched at the top of the stairs, clothed in a billowing nightdress and brandishing in her hand a candlestick.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, sir,’ she called out in a hoarse whisper. ‘Whatever are you doing about so early?’

  ‘Just sorting out a few things.’

  She regarded me, disapprovingly. ‘At such a time of night? I thought you must be some murdering robber.’

  I had no intention of pandering to her fussing. ‘Don’t be so foolish, woman.’

  Murmuring some under-breath criticism, she turned herself about and retired clumpingly away.

  The air was still cool outside the house, the sunshine – weakened though it was by the smoke and the miasma haze – sharply restoring. As I strode down the street a tramp began following close behind, his face and clothes equally dark-stained, so he might all of him have been lately dipped in tar. He tugged at my jacket, calling out for money in a flat, remorseless tone. I recalled, for some reason, Sweet’s philosophy of pauperization, as addressed to Jem the miniature criminal. Charity can be a dangerous thing. ‘Away with you,’ I called out to the fellow, ‘before I fetch the police.’ The threat proved effective, and with a scowl he trudged off to seek some other victim.

  An early morning breakfast stall gave out an enticing aroma and warmth, and I sat for a while, watching the owner working at the charcoal fire pans, boiling up saucer after saucer of coffee, enough for the stream of bleary and poorly washed early birds, stopped on their way to begin their labours. I had several saucers myself, and felt their enlivening qualities battling away my weariness.

  Next I strode along Whitehall to the near end of the Strand, and one of my favourite parts of London. Hungerford market, that elegant construction upon two levels – fish, fruit and meat stalls now just stirring into life, filling the air with fine smells – was built in the same style and with the same Tuscan granite columns as nearby Covent Garden. From the upper terrace on the river side I stepped out on to the younger Brunel’s pedestrian bridge, springing from the very market itself, and busy now with souls hurrying across from the Surrey shore. The crush was a tight one, and it was with some difficulty that I lingered for a moment beneath one of the Italianate towers, to admire the outline of St Paul’s, rising up through the swirling, smoky London haze.

  Proud buildings of this great city. How few of the metropolitan citizens scurrying past would, I pondered, have any knowledge of the peril in which their capital now stood; of the danger that those fine façades would – without a proper system of drainage – quite vanish from sight beneath a remorseless tide of effluent.

  Invigorated by my early morning walk, I decided to make my way back to the house. The prospect of a further day’s hard work was burdensome, perhaps, but not impossibly so. Indeed, such sustained wakefulness and labouring gave me a strange sense of heroism, as if I were the first human ever to have attempted such a thing. Even the unexpected sight of Katie did not subdue my spirits.

  She seemed to have observed me from the far side of the road, through the gathering traffic, and darted across with agility in the moment’s gap between a coal wagon and a brewer’s dray. ‘Mr Aldwych. You’re up early.’

  ‘You too.’

  ‘It’s different with Katie, i’n it. With Katie it’s late.’ Bleary in the sunlight, she glanced up at me with a tired coquettishness. ‘Coming to visit soon, are you?’

  ‘I dare say.’

  ‘That’s my ’Enry.’

  It did not fail to occur to me to wonder, as she strode away, what she could be doing so far from her own domain, and so near my own. I even followed her for a while, until convinced she was pursuing a course away from my house. She might already know its location. I imagined her knocking at the door. Arriving on the very evening when the dinner was to be held, with Edwin Sleak-Cunningham within.

  Too much to think of. And such quantities of work remained to be done. To stride forward was the way, dealing, one by one, with all obstacles in one’s path.

  That wondrous moment, when the vows were said and Isobella was suddenly, indisputably mine. I can recall it exactly; the delicate church scent of candle smoke and damp stone; the pregnant hush of the congregation; the faint summer singing of birds outside, struggling to be heard above the clatter of morning traffic.

  I inspected her, delicate features half seen through the white veil. How tempted I was to lift up the material, reveal her face, open her up. To capture her, draw her to me, until – there and then, in the very church, regardless of shocked convention – my lips would meet her own (an action which, extraordinarily, I had never accomplished before). Joshua Jeavons, stood before the altar, imagining himself kissing his bride Isobella. Kissing slow, slipping his tongue wickedly deep into her mouth, secretly, before the whole congregation of respectable Westminster Anglicans. Kissing Isobella, long and fine in delicious triumph. Kissing her, best of all, before the very eyes of her father.

  I had hoped the man had overcome his disapproval of my status. His manner, after all, had seemed improved; distant but not unfriendly. Then, only a few days before the wedding was to take place, came the incident of the dowry.

  I guessed, even before Isobella spoke, that something was wrong; her manner, I observed as I greeted her in the upstairs room at Trowbridge Street, was grown stiff, almost haughty.

  ‘My father says he does not approve of dowries.’ Though she uttered no opinion of his view, I could sense the anger hidden within. ‘He sees them as an outdated convention, likely to
undermine the independence of a young couple.’

  ‘I see.’ It was devastating news. Also astonishing. One would have expected it to be a matter of pride for a wealthy and successful man to ensure his daughter lived in a state of finery reflective of his achievement. Usually it was so. How humiliating to have all the world see his own progeny endure shortage and discomfort. Yet, I reflected even then, Moynihan had shown little enough concern for the views of his fellows. Never had he troubled to show off his grand house. Indeed, he had steadfastly resisted the curiosity of his engineering colleagues to witness his splendours.

  ‘But why should he do such a thing?’

  ‘That is not for me to say. It is his decision.’ Isobella took refuge in distance, closing herself away as if I was little better than a stranger. Infuriating. Of course I could guess the fellow’s reasons. His decision was, I strongly suspected, nothing less than an attempt to sabotage the wedding. Though Isobella and I had never discussed the subject, we had both been quietly assuming some assistance in our new lives, and, indeed, had built it into our conjectured plans for the future. Of course it was his right, but… I resented the thought of being in the man’s house, his guest. Even now he was likely no more than a few dozen yards distant, separated by only a plaster and brick wall or two.

  ‘You are silent.’ Isobella regarded me questioningly, less remote now.

  ‘It’s a great pity. A pity indeed.’ Our lives would not be impossible, but on my salary alone they would be far from sumptuous.

  Her face grew tense. ‘This changes your views, of...?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Her question surprised me; had she suspected I was some kind of fortune hunter? If her wealth had been an influence on my infatuation it had been only of the most innocent kind; the pleasure of seeing her clothed so beautifully, possessed of such fine manners. ‘Did you need ask?’

  ‘I wanted only to be sure.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, visibly relieved, and my heart was quite warmed, even at this unhappy moment. I took her hand.