Rain spores die on the paving stones, remote energies drawn down into the entropy of the spiral; vegetable forces, pallid ferns pushing the cobbled bricks apart.
We share a bottle of menstrual wine, vagrants; we spit into wild gardens. We lick cigar stumps. We kick walls.
The dwellings on the south side of the Jewish Burial Ground have been evacuated by keyholders, occupied by derelicts and vermin; doomed, the whole zone is doomed; the stones will be razed, brick from brick, their histories flattened, buried in dust mounds. The geology of time is available to us now, at this moment, this afternoon, and will be gone, will be forever unreachable. Unredeemed.
Steps lead up to an openair chapel; high crenellated wall, arched, roofed, summer house, place of worship. Like a dockside; three triangle peaks painted with the eye of Horus. A half savage Baptist garden; tenement ravines all around, keeping out the light; shadow garden, balconies, stairwells, dark entrances. There are twin tablets set into the wall, tract commandments, for eyes lifting from the drone of psalms.
On the right: ‘Labour/is life/blessed is he/who has found/his work.’ The work that was short was life. Soon finished. Crushed.
On the left: ‘Whatsoever/thy hand/findeth to do/do it with/thy might.’
Sixteen windows to the block, and four more set into the roof: blind eyes. Condemned time. This pre-rubble set, held upright on beams. The enduring strength of slums. Bearded charities built to last for a thousand years.
Five arches to the altar shed, the umbral body of the chapel; unattended god trap.
We made shift to the Brewery, let the trace in the ground lead us, the hare foot. A tide pulls us around islands of dereliction, gypsy spaces, remnants of civic concern, carefully plaqued, railway arches worked with wrecked motors, scrap melt. Through Durward to Vallance, cut down Buxton Street towards the back gate of the Brewery, to punch out.
A group of mid-Victorian cottages, marked for demolition, have been sealed with a corrugated iron fence. There is a poster, ‘SS’, Nazi pastiche, radical, protesting Social Insecurity. As we read, a thin vermouth’d voice accosts us; glass tearing silk.
A woman with sauce-bottle hair, dyed rope, interprets for a small, wet skulled, shaking, tremulous, doll-like figure in pyjama trousers and carpet slippers. His armchair has been dragged out onto the pavement, out from where? Perhaps he lives in it. A few streaks of hair have been painted on his scalp, brown-red stain running down his pinched cheeks, like a hammer wound.
The woman has been told to ask if we are Germans.
Joblard, humoured with drink and exercise, raps out a few phrases of cod Mabuse. The little man contorts with real horror, kicking back his feet, dragging the great chair with him, covering his face with a thin arm.
The woman explains that he was in the camps; his name is Hymie, a tailor. They’re going to pull down his house.
My wife and daughter have gone to stay for a few days with her mother, convalescing, within sight of the North Sea. Joblard returns with me, therefore, to run the afternoon into the night.
We tip out the fridge and eat it, shelf by shelf: olives, salad, rice pudding, bacon, cheese. Methodically swilling it down with a mix of Russian Stout and dry blackthorn cider. There remains only a chocolate cake of doubtful provenance, gifted by Divine Lit neighbours, by way of an Alice B. Toklas cookbook; and probably enlivened with middle-eastern additives.
Gorge, swill and choke; mouths black as mud gobblers. A good exhaustion and a buff envelope of bank notes in the pocket.
The cake has no immediate effect, we cram in a few more slices. And the television starts to acquire a previously unnoticed wit. Everything is ironic. Every remark is hilarious, but understated: nobody else could see it. We are lying on the floor, taking everything that is thrown at us, uncritical, amused. It’s all the same, isn’t it? Watch anything and find a value.
The programme we have been waiting for slides up on us, out of nowhere. The final shot in a television investigation of the Whitechapel Murders, The Ripper File.
In our deranged state there is no interest in following detail or making logical connections; we know it all. We shut our eyes: Masons, Clarence, Druitt, conspiracy, asylum. All that matters is the simple basic metaphor: three men, Sickert the painter, Netley the coachman, Gull the doctor. If the equation is neatly made, then it is true. The hair starts to rise on the scalp, there is some sort of recognition, names known, places known. It is confirmed merely.
We force ourselves to concentrate on the remote and ridiculous voices.
‘Do you have a picture of him?’
‘Who?’
‘Sir William Gull.’
‘He looks a lot more important than the other two suspects.’
‘He was. A self-made man. Cured the Prince of Wales of typhoid and never looked back. He left £340,000 – a big fortune in those days.’
‘Not bad now. Can you really see a man like that going down to Whitechapel and playing his part in the murder of five prostitutes?’
I’m crawling towards the set, I’m forcing my face to look at it. Behind the wavering lines is a face that is firmer and better known to me than my own. It is the face of Joblard, the orphan.
Sir William Gull has stolen the orphan’s face. His arrogance and self-containment chill me.
Does Joblard look at himself? Confront the self that is now accusing him, that knows him, that is pushing him to make himself available for the enactment of an ancient crime? The self that he has been unconsciously playing.
He does not: he’s lying, face in the bathtub, groaning, watching the swill of regurgitated chocolate, curry, stout, feathering, clockwise, around the eye of the plughole.
The exchange of wills is postponed.
7
It was the first time I had seen anybody cook with yoghurt. Dark varnish, tall ceiling, window smeared with grease from steaming meats, oak and oilskin, the hull of the room bellying out over a small garden sprinkled with a scattered eruption of sickly plants: sleeves rolled neatly to the elbow, his large hands moved with forensic exactitude, scapula under the sizzling ‘black ornaments’, just before they burnt, shook the rice in a separate pan, merely dipping the fingers of the green vegetables in boiling water. Old India hand.
The day was warm, expansive, blankets of yellow hammerhead flowers breaking out in a screech among the condemned gardens, the fenced lots. The long inertia was torn, the room-locked stiff-spined creaking winter people were irritated, ready to be moving, to get early among the streets; to search for it, find it, take it on.
But Joblard’s heavy odd-paned windows were immovably fixed in ancient paint; a small coal fire red in the grate. He motioned me to his best armchair; we ate.
A surgery of tiny bottles, instruments, tubes, wires; a museum of stones, pelts, stuffed animals, hunters neutralised and grinning with the falsest of teeth; brass candlesticks; sepulchral clocks. So much of the past had been brought into these rooms that the air was smog and bistre; bone dust powdering his scalp, beard shadows set about our faces.
The hand twitched at the muffin bell to summon Mrs Hudson. Who seemed, in fact, to be present – for as the fire died the door would open and a stooping possessed man, affable but unfocused, would appear with a fresh coalbucket. The ash from a cigarhead detached – but before it reached the carpet it was swept into a pan by a diminutive, smiling, utterly sudden woman; so discreet that she was gone, clicking, before we had acknowledged her. The couple were like long resident poltergeists: we had strayed onto their territory and were to be served, unquestioned, but with no superfluous homage, no trace of irony.
There may have been other inhabitants, the house was tall, long windowed, calm – but they were not to be seen. Once some kind of animal manifested, a heap of old black fur, nodding-headed, half blind; slid a few feet towards the fire before being hurtled backwards and out on an invisible leash, the little woman clucking in the doorway.
From the front window: a few trees, a grass patch, sour clay and gravel
, and beyond that, distant warrens of dark brick, unlit: under sentence.
Not having a violin or seven per cent solution within reach Joblard offered a clay pipe, himself sucking and digging at something more theatrical, shag soaked in rum. Time was brown with us, simmering, juicy. Smoke twisted into questions. Blue grey lights ran veins into the ceiling.
‘I think,’ said Joblard, indicating with his pipestem a copy of Stephen Knight’s book, Jack the Ripper, The Final Solution, ‘that we have been saved a great deal of donkey work. This scenario is remorselessly argued and, since it arrives at the cast-list we have already floated, we can accept it as a workable hypothesis and go on from there.’
‘On?’ I asked. ‘Or back?’
‘There’s something inherently seedy and salacious in continually picking the scabs off these crimes, peering at mutilated bodies, listing the undergarments, trekking over the tainted ground in quest of some long-delayed occult frisson. I abhor these hacks with their carrier bags of old cuttings.
‘If Mr Knight had been a chemist not a journalist I wonder if he would have chosen to describe any solution as “final”. A solution, according to my dictionary, is “the act of separating the parts, specially the connected parts of any body”. Unfortunate that. “The dissolving of a solid in a fluid; release; deliverance.”
‘This is precisely what Knight’s explanation does not procure. We are informed, heated, drawn into a collaboration with his version of the truth. But released and delivered? I think not. I don’t think he understands that any delivery is required.
‘Or what monster might result from that bloody-handed parturition?
‘We acknowledge that there were five prostitutes killed by, or under the instruction of, Sir William Gull. A coach was involved, and a coachman, John Netley. The third man remains vaporous and loose faced. The events took place between August and November, 1888, in a specific location, Whitechapel.’
He paused, ‘I like the idea of the grapes, too.’
He took up a limestone pebble from the table and twisted it nervously in his hand.
‘Was this any more than a local conspiracy? Or is the cycle even now turning on us? As the century dies will another pattern of sacrifice be demanded? Do we slowly begin to understand only because we are about to become performers in the same blind ritual?’
Our conversation progressed in spasms and random leaps: dead frogs on an electric shelf. ‘From one drop of water,’ wrote Holmes in his article, The Book of Life, ‘a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic.’ But we were not logicians. We darted, snapped, disbelieved ourselves, turned back: always using the evidence of the past as our justification.
‘I found something curious in Michael Harrison,’ I began, ‘published three years before Knight. Harrison claims, “What Sir William Gull had become to the Royal Family, Nobility and Aristocracy of Great Britain, in the field of medicine… Sherlock Holmes – even by the mid-’Eighties was well on the way to becoming in the field of protecting the Great from their enemies’ malice…”
‘I think this is a better entry: by way of the shape that is unconsciously written into the text. What matters is what they don’t say; but what is coded there, all that wonderful unexplained detail, like a Gothic Cathedral. That is how these books ensnare us in an addictive grip.
‘Peel down Study in Scarlet or Jekyll and Hyde or Mystery of a Hansom Cab and out come the prophetic versions. Beneath the narrative drive is a plan of energy that can, with the right key, be consulted.’
I took a copy of The Sherlock Holmes Long Stories out of my bag and prodded it over towards him. I had treated the text, like a prison censor, carefully blacking out, to uncover the mantic tremble beneath.
‘Obviously this is too blatant a reading. Better to take the flash of single words, cut phrases; let it build its own chain.’
‘Netley. Surgeon. Horse.
London, that great cesspool.
Together in a hansom. Poor devil. Looking for lodgings.
Strange thing.
The second man to-day.
Couldn’t get someone to go halves in some nice rooms.
Perhaps you would not care for him as a constant companion.
A little queer in his ideas.
Well up in anatomy.
Has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge.
Not a man that it is easy to draw out.
Avoids the place.
Some reason for washing your hands of the matter.
Cold-bloodedness.
A little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid.
May be pushed to excess.
When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick.
Rather bizarre shape.
Verify how far bruises may be produced after death.
Saw him at it with my own eyes.
Not a medical student?
Turned down a narrow lane and passed through
a small side-door which opened
into a wing of the great hospital.
Familiar ground. Needed no guiding.
No doubt you see the significance?
Let us have some fresh blood, he said.
Transparent fluid. Dull mahogany colour.
A brownish dust.
The stains are a few hours old.
Hundreds of men now walking the earth who would
long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes.
A man is suspected of a crime
months perhaps after it has been committed.
His linen examined.
Rust stains, or fruit stains?
Then there was Mason. The notorious.
I have to be careful. I dabble.
Discoloured with strong acids.
Know the worst of one another before they begin.
A mystery is it?
Much obliged to you for bringing us together.’
‘Dictation at this speed takes the scribe, often under pressure of work or disease, so fast and so deep that he writes it before it happens, and by writing it he causes it to happen, a fate game that allows the unconscious no release. He cannot escape his devils by describing them. The medium does not choose who he will serve.
‘This is to reverse the conventions of detective fiction, where a given crime is unravelled, piece by piece, until a murderer is denounced whose act is the starting point of the narration. Our narrative starts everywhere. We want to assemble all the incomplete movements, like cubists, until the point is reached where the crime can commit itself.
‘That is why there are so many Ripper candidates, so many theories: and they can all be right. They can all fade away in private asylums.
‘The Whitechapel deeds cauterised the millennial fears, cancelled the promise of revelation.’
We needed air: we would walk down to Southwark and examine the surgical tower.
Cobourg Road is a rib from a much older track, the pilgrim way, Old Kent Road, a turn beyond the Becket. This was an area that knew itself, valued itself; but lived with a fear of what was coming, and coming for them. Its secret could be violated: they were existing in suspended time and kept their voices low, made no demands.
Conan Doyle set many of his Sherlockian tales here. In this territory Dr Watson found a wife. The victims of crime awaited its visitation, not yet invaded by the angels of damage; mainline razors, nerve-clipt hatchetheads.
The zone was defended by its rigorous domesticity. The family remained a unit of force within its own walls, related and connected to so many other tribal alignments, van driving uncles, factory workers from the railway caverns: much could be shared, arranged, adjusted, small wrongs seen to. A closeness that was charmed; ordered, ritualised, unspoken. Social workers would unpick it, harm it with care, until it was gone forever.
When the underclothes of the first victim of the Ripper, Mary Ann Nichols, were examined they were found to bear the mark of the Lambeth Workhouse, which led to her identification as the wife of William Nichol
s, a printer, of Cobourg Road, Camberwell, from whom she had been separated for about nine years. The protection of this enclosure, not being visible or articulated, was erased in gin, burnt out, herself whored, cut loose, sucked inevitably, hauled in, from what she had played at being, down, mindless generosity, servant to Thrawl Street, Fournier, Flower & Dean, another more savage enclosure, the heated intestine of the city: she was slit, drawn out, unmeasured.
We break from this, carelessly. The Surrey Canal has dried; the old cholera line, work ditch, that did for John Gull. The unmarked passage out, to Greenland Dock and the Limehouse Reach, is a track of rubbish, waste, old streets tipped-in to dull its meaning. Maps of futility brought to ground.
There’s nowhere to drink here: the pubs collapsed into their own pretensions, understudy villains ordering up cocktail froth, the mind-destroying jingle of electronic pickpockets.
Southwark holds its time, with the City, with Whitechapel, with Clerkenwell, holds the memory of what it was: it is possible to walk back into the previous, as an event, still true to this moment. The Marshalsea trace, the narrative mazetrap that Dickens set, takes over, the figures of fiction outliving the ghostly impulses that started them. The past is a fiction that absorbs us. It needs no passport, turn the corner and it is with you. The things they do there are natural, you do those things. Detached from this shadow you are nothing, there is nothing. You have no other existence.
Young doctors, with the yelping loudness of Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen, with that exuberance whose post-textual charm does not translate onto the street, shove into The Bunch of Grapes, to drink themselves steady for an afternoon in the cutting-rooms.
We cross St Thomas Street to reach the Red Tower.
A History of Pain under the protection of the cathedral rose: a threading of fruits, cornucopic horns, standing off the subdued brick. We enter, pay our coins, climb.
Under the eaves, the Herb Garret: here are the relics, the Whitechapel bell mortars, where friable bodies are reduced to powder. Here are the names of the Foul Wards; Lazarus, Job, Naples, Magdalen. Here is the warning: ‘The interest of the poor/and their duty/are the same.’ Under low rafters, the seed heads of poppies.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 5
