Klamm went through the first story, A Study in Scarlet, carefully, line by line, and saw no reason to go any further. He didn’t read it again. But he wanted every copy that ever existed. His life was abdicated, his quest begun. Selfless Klamm, on the road to the Dharma.
It was known that Klamm lived, slept and ate, if he did eat, in a council flat in Lambeth. Nobody had visited him in it, but booksellers’ catalogues were sent to that address. It was rumoured in the trade, in the way that rumours become facts, that Klamm was a man of property, with holdings in India, with interests in Whitechapel. It was rumoured, it was whispered by young men in pinstripe suits and splashy ties, the Salon of the Rejected, who spent their days gossiping at their desks, licking their lip gloss, part of the furniture of what pretended to be the leading establishment for the sale of Modern First Editions, meaning anything that looked good in a glass cabinet, it was whispered, it was mooted, the legend became fact, that Klamm owned a house somewhere, nowhere, Clerkenwell or Finsbury or Holborn, a house that was never opened to daylight, whose few articles of use had been left undisturbed, sheeted, whose rooms were filled with shelves, whose shelves were filled with books, each book wrapped in tissue paper, sealed, placed within a brown paper bag, sealed again: that there were rooms and rooms, shelf upon shelf, nothing but wrapped books, like looking into a burial ground, erased inscriptions, neat lines, the gravestones covered in stocking-masks.
It was to this den that Nicholas Lane and the Late Watson decided to follow J. Leper-Klamm.
They skulked, unlikely, among the fleecy secretaries, the green accountants from Trinity College, Dublin, the company men, suited and shaped, jogging towards their first coronary.
The evening was mockingly mild. Leper-Klamm emerged in a long black coat, tethered to several bulging carrier-bags. He would be making for his sanctuary.
When he bought a book he would ask, unfailingly polite, humble as battery acid, ‘Could I trouble you, Sir? A brown bag? Thank you, thank you. And one more? Thank you, Sir. A carrier? Thank you.’
The fact that he was, single-handed, paying their salaries, allowing them to build quite amusing little collections of Uranian Verse, did not buy Mr Klamm any respect from the top of the market, Booksellers by Appointment to the country houses of England, the libraries of Nebraska. They bowed him in, they sniggered him out.
Along Finsbury Pavement, into the Square; its Babylonian follies, white brick Empires of Insurance, the architecture of fear. City Road, dissenting pocket: they dodge by railings and into Bunhill Fields. Leper-Klamm is bent over, hardly seems to lift his feet from the ground, propelled, by the wind, down well-oiled tracks; looks at nothing.
From behind Bunyan’s memorial Nicholas Lane whispers, ‘When he thinks he’s been watched – he sings.’ Nothing of that. The dull slab that marks the spot where the soul of William Blake is not: shaded path, railed-off boulders, holding down for ever the bloody minded, the hymn singers. Tanks of tap’d water from victims who never repined at their case. Klamm sings nothing. His lips move, a muttered monologue. ‘Do you have an edition of a book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir? A Study in Scarlet? Must be complete, Sir. Otherwise, condition unimportant. Thank you, Sir. Thank you.’ It’s almost a song.
Down Banner, now only a few feet behind him, Whitecross, and we are stopped by the sight of Hawksmoor’s obelisk, St Luke’s, white beacon, Nile finger. Leper-Klamm does not lift his head. Scrapes between cars, Helmet Row. Now he looks about him, draws out a key on a long piece of string.
We speed through the gate at the north side of the church, race round the path, diving into the shelter of a laurel bush, among its lacquered leaves and poison berries.
He’s at the door, beyond Micawber Machinery. He’s in. Shuttered tradesman’s mansion. Beneath the needle of unspent energies, within the protected space of that roofless enclosure; sunlight lifting the blood at the rims of the broken church windows. The obelisk seems to make light, not reflect it.
Leper-Klamm has dived out of time, by a tunnel of his own devising.
Nicholas Lane has supplied him in the past; it is decided that he will go in alone. And make the pitch irresistible.
There is no bell; he knocks, he hammers, he shouts. Nothing. No Klamm. He is absorbed into the shelves of books in brown paper wrappings. He is beneath a dustsheet. There is no sound of breath from the darkened house. He is most there when the house is empty.
Nicholas Lane scribbles a message on a sheet torn from his notebook. ‘We have a variant first issue – trial? proof? – of S. in S. Are you interested? Nicholas Lane.’ And, finding no slit in the wood of the door, he slides his communication underneath, letting it float into Klamm’s self-created fiction.
Nothing. The exhausted sun falls, bending the shadow of the obelisk away from the house, and the book pirates, as they squat, foxes, in their bush; casting them into a ditch of darkness.
‘Do you have an edition, Sir, of a book by Arthur Conan Doyle? A Study in Scarlet.’
Leper-Klamm manifests. The door has not opened, their eyes never left it, but Klamm is at their side, hand in front of his face; cuff flapping, black tie loosed, shirt buttons open, revealing a severely-foxed undergarment.
‘I think we could share the expense, Sir, on this occasion, of a taxi. Yes. Yes, Sir. Thank you.’
And immediately, as Leper-Klamm raised an arm, a cab, bowling down the bus line to carve up a cyclist before she hit the Old Street roundabout, slapped its brakes and squealed obsequiously to a halt.
We headed east, womb comforts, Nicholas Lane giving himself a well-deserved nose jolt. The narrator closed his eyes, to shut out the plague of street names, the undiminishing stream of high buildings, cornice, frieze, architrave, gaunt façade. He could swallow no more detail.
J. Leper-Klamm, very softly, began to sing.
12
To: Sarah Hinton
Bartholomew Close, London
May, 1850
My dear Sarah,
Once again I take up my pen to defend my actions: to you who understand them best. I confess, with feelings of the deepest mortification, that I hold myself to be a fool, blinder than any 3 beetles. I am ready now to throw down my pen in sheer disgust at my incapacity. It takes me weeks and months to find out the plainest, simplest things. It is only in the last two days that I have opened my eyes to the most obvious deduction – namely, that we have a power of controlling our thoughts; if the brain thinks, it must be something else that controls this action. There is something in us, or connected with us, that makes use of our brain: something thinks us, that’s evident. Something dictates my dictation. My brain, I am now certain, is a part, and only a part, of some greater intelligence – and my only purpose must be to let that intelligence, that mind, use me. I must serve my own will; for my will is more than my own.
I am a fool, as I said before. I have been diving into the abstrusest of physiology, and mounting into the higher abstractions of morals, to find evidence of this fact; shutting my eyes to it all the while. I deserve a good whipping for my stupidity. I could wish there was someone here to give me one now.
It is clear that if the brain is the organ that thinks, there certainly exists something that makes use of it for thinking. The brain is the organ of the spirit, the instrument by which the spirit carries out its purposes, whether of thinking or acting. The brain is perfectly passive, just as passive as a piano. I hurl down the false dogma – viz., that living matter can act of itself. That is a grand error. Living matter, like dead, can only act as it is acted upon.
It is Physiology that must clear up these metaphysical disputes; in fact, metaphysics must be merged in physiology, as astrology in astronomy.
Don’t you remember that Coleridge terms the understanding ‘a sensuous faculty’ and exclaims, ‘If there be a spiritual in man, the will is that spiritual’?
It wasn’t reason that led Coleridge to say that. It was inspiration. It was one of those bursts of intuition by which great poets in all ages
have anticipated the discoveries of science.
I come, in the end, to this – the spirit is will and the will is holy; I must not inhibit, or stand against, its promptings. The will is law: the law is, have no law. Hold to nothing, be ready for anything. Love is the law: love and do what you will: what wills you is love.
This is a horrid letter; you mustn’t puzzle your brain about it. I have sent the letter to you only because I could not send it to Margaret. The endeavour to understand oneself should bring us into closer intimacy with our Maker. I cannot strive to penetrate the depths of my being, without feeling, afresh and more deeply, the intimate relation in which I stand to God and His care for me, His love of me, the happiness it must be to do His Will.
It is agony for me to dwell upon the idea that I have gained Margaret’s love only to make it a source of misery to her. I cannot vindicate myself. I wish that I had some punishment to bear that might relieve me from that thought. I have told Margaret that perhaps it is my first and chief duty at present to seek for truth; and that nothing can so well supply the kind of knowledge most useful, most requisite for me, as the seeing of mankind under all their various phases, the watching of human nature and human passions as developed under various circumstances.
I should be afraid to have any woman for my wife who would deliberately sacrifice what she considered her duty to God for love to me.
I must go to bed; but I want you to have this letter in the morning,
your brother,
James
Hinton, the surgeon, sat at his kitchen table, dissecting a mutton chop and carving a human ear. He ran his blade along the spine of the helix, peeling back tissue. He looked at the surface of the cartilage and saw the face of a man, in profile, something old but unborn. The secret listener to all our sorrows. A copy of Coleridge’s essays on The Principles of Method was propped open before him. He forked up a sliver of cold meat, composing a letter to Caroline Haddon, his intended sister-in-law. For ten years his understanding with her sister, Margaret, had simmered, steamed, faltered, prosed, analysed itself; but now that he had an income, patients, a house of his own, the marriage could be postponed no longer.
The saviour of women. Whenever he thought of Margaret he wrote to Caroline. Margaret was to be his partner, the mother of his children, but Caroline would remain something more, the woman who listened to him, who had time, unattached, to follow him in his speculations.
He wanted Caroline for a sister much more than he wanted Margaret for a wife. A wife would be a part of himself, would qualify his idea of himself, but a younger sister – that was a darker mystery.
The dissection of the chop was complete, Hinton cleaned his fingers in his beard, cleaned the beard on the lapel of his jacket; bare-necked, long nosed. The wild undisciplined eyes turning inwards, forcing the world beyond his reach into focus. No time to take up his pen; Hinton dictates to the white cell of his kitchen. To the window, the narrow close, the tree-shaded graveyard of St Bartholomew the Great, the courts of the Hospital, now swollen far beyond the priory church that gave it sponsorship; Rahere’s malarial vision, the great black eagle taking him to the lip of the bottomless pit.
Flayed saint, Hinton would inscribe his testament upon the skin of your back: nail it to the door. Alleyways of false windows, painted watchers. Hinton, his mouth a spider, dictates a web of beard.
Caroline. I am justified. I am without envy, the Saviour of Women. Love is the law: do what you will. I never yet laid my hand upon any portion of God’s universe that did not turn to gold beneath my grasp. Caroline. Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.
Dr Gull told me that many years ago he was walking through a field of peas. He took a few in his hand, and as he meditated he rolled them between his fingers. While thus engaged he passed by a house where lived a woman deranged in her mind. She asked him to give her what he had in his hand. He gave her two peas; she took them. The next day he called and found that they had cured her.
And what did he do then? He laughed. He might have saved from pollution the paper on which have been printed cruel books. He did not do it; but be his faults forgiven him – we have all sinned.
Caroline, forgive me. I must be scourged, my faults must be beaten from me. I will be whipped into the light of truth.
He laid his face upon the table; blood, meat, squashed to his chest, bare backed; the bulky trousers tied with a cord; over the table, forced forward, up on the toes of his boots. Beard to the cold wood; Caroline.
The knotted scourge cut into him. I will take upon me the sins of men, that women might be set free from their chains. Do what you will. Gather up the force that is in evil things, and put it to use. The sharpness of the pain-flower spreads, salt sweat running into his eyes, tears. The sweet mystery of pain.
Flesh will rise to be the spirit’s minister. Praised be pain and praised be joy! Both are holy. You martyrs of Charterhouse. You blessed fathers going cheerfully to your deaths like bridegrooms to their marriage. O cut and split, this shell of skin! False restraint, self-virtue, keeping the truth away. Let bleed!
Joy is more bitter than pain and pain dearer than delight. The woman who says that sensuous delight needs some restraint is so muddled and bewildered by false ideas and false feelings that her instincts are utterly perverted and she does not know what she says. Have we not treated pleasure as a sort of harlot? See what she has become!
Only strength of passion can bring it to purity. Prostitutes have an objection to show their bodies; many will not do it for any sum. They have made a pure thing impure. I loathe their restraints. What I require, I require at your hand. Do it with thy might. Do it.
It is Caroline who unbuttons herself, long skirts falling to the floor, shift, who is naked, bright, who stands behind him, her sweet breath on his neck. The scourge of pleasure is in her hand. It is Caroline who releases the rope at his waist, whose small hand runs over him.
If all pain were seen in the light of martyrdom were not the work done? It is done, the light, the word spoken.
Her wet mouth, fevered with his prophetic heat, gobbles at him, swallows the incontinent spasms, the words falling into gasps, the barking howl of joy.
13
Paid off at the yard gates: Joblard is underground, at Tarxien, investigating the apsidal temples of Malta, the Hypogeum at Hal Saflieni, red ochre oracle, hive of voices around woman clay, the bell-shaped skirts; he is tapped into cool stone, the voices rush at him, reverberating certainties, he has not the speed to form the questions, split tongue; my sister-in-law, red hair, is sitting, cross-legged, with the television set, waiting. We are going to eat at the Huntsman.
A photograph of Hymie Beaker, of Buxton Street, savagely attacked, beaten. At his corner, edging towards Vallance Road. No discovered motive. Thin bones snapped, the paper of his face slashed and torn, handfuls of hair. In the London Hospital; between death and the road.
An identikit portrait of a man seen lurking, talking: horror hybrid, the features of myself and Joblard, blended. Cut and put together. Gone out of the human range.
Where two men are.
We had walked so often, after the initial incident, beyond the lorry loads of dwarf chickens awaiting ritual slaughter, the dribbling stench of fear; passing the house, trying to repair the psychic wound. But had never again seen Hymie Beaker, the tailor. Nor the red haired woman. The doors and windows bolted.
The third man had escaped.
14
It was closing in on Nicholas Lane’s flat; it was all collapsing. Young Kernan Quinn had been careless, he had never been anything else, but it hadn’t mattered up to now. Nicholas Lane had been away so much, running about town, in such frenzy; the telephone, never stopping. Freaked: Kernan went out, took himself to the pub. He didn’t drink but he had to get away from this oppressive sense of catastrophe; not knowing that he carried it with him, a shirt. It was all closing in, breathless, the dim weight of the town folding him in on himself.
All kinds of weird st
uff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied, were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.
‘Can I take a look at that, son?’
Kernan ignored the Scotchman, name unknown, motives questionable. A presence, clammy in undershirt and golfing jacket. ‘I think I read that one. It’s a good one, that is.’
Kernan lifted the book and held it in front of his face; he hadn’t turned a page since he’d sat down, the book wasn’t his, he’d picked it at random, a light one, easy to carry.
‘Thought it might have been something else. Not what I thought. That’s the wrong book, son. You’ve got the wrong book there.’
‘Fuck off.’ Kernan spoke, provoked. Not to the Scotchman: to the world at large. ‘Sod off.’
He’d heard Nicholas Lane putting the Scotchman down when he tried to run him books lifted from the Seaman’s Library. He’d been on the dry and getting to be bad news all over; they’d had a whip-round to buy him a bottle of Bells and put him back on the brazier. Bury the bugger.
‘Listen, son, listen to me. I think I’ve got something for your gaffer. Know where he is?’
Nothing. Kernan squeezed out a pimple at the edge of his nose, speculatively licking his finger. Saw from the window the taxi pull up across the road.
‘Listen to me, son. Tell your gaffer to come round, tell him. Got something that’s for him. His kind of stuff. God, it’s strange! Fucking weird stuff, you tell him. Great covers on ’em. Sick! Want him to have first crack. You fucking tell him, son.’
Secretly, the Scotchman hated bookdealers, and as he sold to them, he exacted a terrible revenge. He razored out, with unusual care, one page from the middle of the text, so delicately, it was never noticed. The books were passed on, shelved, never read. In many of the great collections were books that had been emasculated and were valueless. The Scotchman liked that. It made him feel good. It never came back on him. Thinking about it, he smiled; terrifying Kernan, who was already on his feet and backing towards the door.
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Page 8
