Kept

by D. J. Taylor

  UNFORTUNATE CASE IN CLERKENWELL

  THE CORONER, Mr. Samuels, said that the police had been called to a house in Clerkenwell Court. Here they found the body of the deceased lying in a chair. Mr. Crummles, surgeon attached to the Clerkenwell force, who attended the scene, certified that the deceased had died of a phthisis, exacerbated by malnutrition. Mr. Samuels asked, by this did he mean that the deceased had starved to death? Mr. Crummles said that he supposed he did.

  Constable Gaffney, who had arrived first at the house, testified that the room in which the deceased had been found was empty of everything except a bed, the chair in which the body was lying and a small cupboard. The latter contained the smaller part of a quartern loaf and a minute quantity of tea.

  Mr. Edward Scrivener of Balls Pond Road, Islington, stated that as the deceased’s landlord he had been accustomed to receive a rent of six shillings per week, payable on the preceding Friday. This rent had been in abeyance for three weeks. “Were you acquainted with the deceased’s circumstances?” “I was not.” “Had you taken any steps for the recovery of the money?” “This is a poor house, sir, and the rent is often owing.”

  Mrs. Hannah Hook, a seamstress residing at the property, stated that the deceased had fallen into a decline following the death of her husband in a street accident. She had been accustomed to perform small services for the deceased, providing her with supper, coals, &c., but lately these attentions had been refused.

  Constable Gaffney said that it was the poorest house he had seen, that in a dozen years of service he had seen none worse. The deceased’s clothing, which would customarily have been given to the relieving officer, had been burnt as verminous.

  Mr. Samuels said that it was an unfortunate case, but that as no person or institution could be shown to have failed in any duty that was owed to the deceased, he could only record a verdict of death by natural causes.

  HOLBORN AND CLERKENWELL GAZETTE, December 1866

  The clergyman, shovel hat pulled down over his forehead, hands plunged into the pockets of his coat, strides swiftly over the wet sand. It is low tide, and the sea is far away: half a mile at least lies between him and the flat, rippling breakers. At his feet have been flung interesting deposits from its passage: knots of purple-brown weed, spars of driftwood, a coil of rope, a string of onions. To his left-hand side, behind the dunes, pine trees rise into the pale air. The clergyman sees neither the trees nor the flotsam and jetsam at his feet, for his mind is bent on other things. Tall, thin, vellum face emerging above a white stock, Gainsborough could have painted him, placed him on a horse, even, to emphasise the curve of his legs, but this is not Gainsborough’s age. A mile behind the shore there is a tarmacadamed road and a few miles beyond that a railway line, and in Wells, on the boundary of the clergyman’s parish, a photographer has recently opened up a studio. Wearing their best clothes, the clergyman and his wife have been photographed by this man, sitting in stiff-backed chairs, with an album open between them. This is the way of things, he thinks.

  There are jellyfish lying dead on the sand, and the clergyman stops to look at them: immense things the shape of diskoi that he once saw cradled by the athletes in one of Mr. Leighton’s Attic paintings. Despite the chill and the intensity of the February wind, he is not quite alone. Two hundred yards further along the shoreline there is an old woman, like himself dressed in black, gathering up driftwood, to whom, having ascertained that she is a member of the Wesleyan chapel a mile from his church, he has nodded rather than spoken. Nearer at hand another person—almost a gentleman, the clergyman thinks, from his dress—is prodding with a stick at some unidentified object lying on the lip of a rock pool. Interested in spite of himself and the wind, the clergyman alters the line of his walk. As he approaches, the man—he is gaunt and tall with a red, weather-beaten face and carries a knapsack at his shoulder—looks up.

  “Mollusca irridens. It is rare in these parts.”

  For a moment the clergyman wonders what he means. Then he sees that his gaze is being directed to a small, grey-backed crustacean that seems to have embedded itself into the crown of a rock.

  “Indeed?”

  “One would customarily see it in Scotland. The Baltic, perhaps.”

  “You are a collector, I take it?”

  The man pats his knapsack, whose contents—pieces of what look like seaweed, the yellow beak of a gull—are bulging out of their binding: rather, the clergyman thinks, like Mollusca irridens. “My name is Dunbar,” he says, producing a card which corroborates this fact, as if there is a chance that business can be done between them here on this beach. “Are you in the collecting line yourself, sir?”

  The clergyman smiles bleakly. “Humanity is sufficient for me.”

  The man laughs, rather high and cracked, so that the clergyman wonders if he is quite right in the head: a man with a knapsack and a high complexion laughing into the wind on a rainswept Norfolk beach in winter. There used not to be such persons naturalising among the rock pools. It is another new thing, the clergyman thinks. He touches the peak of his shovel hat with a forefinger and presses on through the spongiform graveyard to the sea. Here the wind lifts. In the distance, beyond the breakers, wild water rages. The world is changing, the clergyman acknowledges, thinking again of the curious sepia representation of himself and his wife, and of Mollusca irridens, whatever that may be, and Mr. Dunbar’s card pressed into his hand, and yet I am the same.

  The clergyman gazes out once more towards the surging water. The things that press in on his mind are at once quotidian and cosmic: a flaxen-haired child in its nursery, an unwritten sermon, a disagreeable conversation with his wife about unnecessary expense, the ineffable spirit moving across the face of the waters. A slab of air, as raw now as when it first blew south from Jutland, descends upon his head, sending the shovel hat racing away across the sand. The clergyman, still maintaining his dignity even in this hatless state, moves somewhat stiffly in pursuit, off towards the line of the trees, the woman in the house and the rest of his years on God’s earth.

  Behind him the waves crash, die and are renewed.

  APPENDIX I

  LOST, STOLEN OR STRAYED: ON A VANISHED YOUNG LADY

  When in want of recreation I will cheerfully own that my delight is to peruse the “miscellaneous advertisements” column of a certain newspaper. To be sure, such a wealth of interest—pathos—human sentiment—is contained within their pages that a day would not be sufficient to extract it. There is, for example, the gentleman who undertakes to supply sherry straight from the casks of Don Juan de la Frontera himself in his great distillery at Cordoba. I declare I should almost like to purchase a bottle of that sherry simply to learn how the gentleman came by it. Then there are the goods that a great number of the advertisers are continually trying to dispose of for which there would seem to be no apparent need. Who is there, to particularise, who feels himself in urgent want of a basket of miscellaneous crockery, the Annual Register for 1843 or certain spars of timber supposedly taken from the hull of HMS Victory as she lay awaiting refurbishment in dry dock at Chatham? Yet most fascinating of all, I propose, is the little clump of items—sometimes burgeoning to the size of a whole column, more often to be counted on the fingers of one hand—that some ingenious compiler has thought to arrange under the legend Missing.

  Missing! So much of life, it seems to me, is taken up in a quest for that which formerly lay at our side, so discreetly that we scarcely noticed its presence, and is now unconscionably taken from us. Things great and small: string, sealing wax, a woman’s love and the honest affections of one’s child—all are gone rolling away into a kind of phantasmagorical wainscoting from which no power can ever wrest them back. As a boy I had what was popularly represented as a genius for losing things, to the extent that this propensity was remarked on, became as much a part of the face I presented to the world as the colour of my hair. Sweetmeats, combs and schoolbooks passed through my hands like the rising wind. I lost a fourpenny piece,
with which my mother had commissioned me to buy a quartern loaf. (Heavens but there was a row about that, whose remembrance sizzles in my brain forty years later.) I lost an ornamental silver locket, which contained a portrait of a late aunt, and was soundly beaten. (The locket was later discovered on a bough of the apple tree—how it got there I know not to this day.) I lost half the bundles of clothing I was ordered to take to that respectable gentleman who trades under the sign of the three brass balls—but this is perhaps to reveal too much of our domestic circumstances—and I lost the tickets that I was intended to bring back.

  To glance at the three or four, or six or seven, or on certain wonderful days even nine or ten supplications addressed to the world by those who have mislaid something close to their heart is, then, to be reminded with particular force of the circumstances of one’s own life. The situation is entirely that of the young man bent over a novel from the circulating library, reading of the faithful Lothario separated from his fair Rosina by a baleful parent, a romantic baronet or the Catholic Church, who looks up to exclaim, “Yes, that is exactly how my precious Jane and I were parted, d——them all!” There is, for example, the case of the gentleman out walking with his dog on Hampstead Heath, a basset hound answering to the name Tip, the dog seeing a rabbit, the gentleman quite unable to check its natural propensities, &c. How I felt for the gentleman in the depths of his abandoned misery! How I longed to present him with a four-legged substitute, were it not that the gift would surely inflame, rather than subdue, the spark of his remembrance! Then there is the lady travelling from Kensington to Fulham by omnibus, lulled by the balmy air into a light repose, waking to find the box beside her gone and the silver teapot inside it, “a most valuable and exquisite heirloom,” in transit to the menders on account of a fractured spout, vanished—well, my heart yearns to strike at the wretch who now puts Bohea into it. All this, as I say, has the effect of returning me to my youth and the days when no purse or satchel was safe in my hands, when a hat could not remain on my head a minute before disappearing into the very ether, and umbrellas were like oversized toothpicks, such was the promptitude with which I flung them from me. I lost a corkscrew once, in a room eight feet by six which contained, in addition to myself, only a bottle of wine, a table and an empty sideboard. Another time I lost a sovereign given to me by an old gentleman of blessed memory even before he quit the house at which he visited me.

  All this was no doubt very bad of me, very illustrative of certain grave defects in my character. And yet, for myself, I think there is much to be said in mitigation. I was, for example, quite discriminating in my mislayings and confined myself, for the most part, to inanimate objects. I lost a pair of white duck trousers and a pie dish (the look on my mother’s face when that receptacle was shown to have vanished from my tender care!), and yet I never, I think, lost a cat, a dog or a person. I certainly never lost a young lady of seven-and-twenty, confided into my care by the terms of her husband’s will, which is what a parcel of Lincoln’s Inn lawyers appear to have done this twelve months past.

  The case is so widely known—brought to us by way of a dozen hints and suggestive nudgings—that it is perhaps superfluous to restate its particulars. A young lady living on an estate in Suffolk—not of sound mind, we regret to say, in fact a young lady of whom society has seen nothing these last two years—is widowed by an unhappy accident. In anticipation of this unfortunate possibility, her husband’s will provides very suitably for a trustee, the settlement of capital for all manner of prudent schemes, meant to secure, if not that young lady’s happiness, then her decent and proper care in circumstances in which, it may be devoutly hoped, she might recover her reason. And then what happens? Why like Tip the basset hound, or the antique silver teapot in the Kensington omnibus, or the corkscrew that so frustrated me in my vinous youth, the young lady vanishes.

  Where has she gone? The lawyers—Sir Ezekiel Foodle, QC and Solicitor Noodle—don’t know. The trustees—Baron Doodle and His Honour Judge Quoodle—can’t precisely say. There is talk of a house in the country at which the young lady may or may not be sequestered, of discreet medical establishments at which she may or may not be lodged. But where is she? Where can she be found, and if not heard—for we believe the young lady’s afflictions to be of a very grievous nature—then at least seen? I declare that if I were the young lady’s relative I should feel like inserting a half column in the newspaper of which I have spoken under the heading “Lost, Stolen or Strayed: On a Vanished Young Lady,” giving full particulars and an address for return. Such a course might not produce the young lady, but it might, as in the case of poor Tip or the Kensington teapot, realise an outpouring of public sympathy that were at least as valuable as Sir Ezekiel Foodle’s professional indifference or His Honour Judge Quoodle’s manifest neglect of his duty.

  —ALL THE YEAR ROUND, August 1864

  APPENDIX II

  JOE PEARCE: HISTORY OF A VARMINT

  I was born a varmint, and I’ll die one, I daresay. I was born in Nottingham, the year the old king died. I don’t remember my father. I remember being in a barn, in the rain, with a man as was supposed to look after me but didn’t. Perhaps that was my father. I don’t know. When I was four, my mother took us to London and we lived in Limehouse, where she had a little shop and sold greenstuff and sprats to the people that passed by on their way to work, but it never prospered. Nothing ever prospered with my mother. After that she took ill and lay in bed, and the rest of us—for I had a sister and a little brother—had to make shift as best we could. Most days I went mudlarking at King James’s Stairs or Limehouse Hole, waiting till the tide had run out and seeing what I could find. There wasn’t ever much. A length of rope, maybe, or a handful of coals. The best thing was the copper nails that came from the ships in dry dock, but even if you found one, chances were a big boy would take it from you. When I was twelve, a man as bought stuff from the mudlarks took a shine to me and give me a job and I went out with him in his cart, but I didn’t like it and I stole whatever I could. I stole a watch that a man had left on a shop counter. I stole the man that I worked for’s hat and pawned it. That was the kind of chap I was.

  My mother had died by now. Did I miss her? I don’t rightly know. I remember her face above the coverlet and her asking how much I’d brought home, that’s all. After she’d died I didn’t care to stay with my sister and brother no more, and I went to live with some chaps as lodged in an old blacking factory by the river. That was nice company, I can tell you! Most of what I know I learned there, and that’s a great deal. When I was fourteen, I stole a pig from a market garden down at Woolwich and got sent to the House of Correction. What did I do there? Well now, I stole a cake from the kitchen as had been baked for the warden”s birthday and a handkerchief from the parson as came to preach over us on Sunday morning—that was the correction I got. When I came out, a gentleman as was connected with the place—one of those soft coves in the charitable line—got me a job in a newspaper office in the Strand, but I didn’t take to it. I stole the type that the printers had left out on the desks and sold it, and the pocketbooks of the men that left their jackets hung up outside the washroom, but bless you, no one suspected me. I was living with Maria Chitty by this time, which was a girl I’d found agreeable, and she me, at Bethnal Green, and we spent the money on whatever took our fancy: toy dogs perhaps, or a hat with a feather, or half a dozen faggots from the cookshop. I was good to Maria after my fashion, never struck her above thrice or sent her out when the funds were low. The Gentleman knows that, and will tell you, for he knew her too.

  All that was a long time ago, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t like to remember it. I saw my sister once in the Whitechapel Road when I was mooching about that way, but I never went up to her. Poor Janey! I daresay she’d have been pleased to see me, for she was always fond of her brother, but that sort of thing never pays, you know. As for me now, I’m a sporting character. Cocks. Bull terriers. Prizefighting. I’ll go twenty miles into
the country to see a match if I’ve a mind to, and have the funds. The Derby too is a place I’m often to be found. The Tutbury Pet, the Coalheaver, the Chicken—I’ve seen them all in my time, aye, and shaken hands with them and stopped for refreshment, for I’m a warm man when I’ve money in my pocket. I had forty pound once, that the Gentleman put there. Don’t ask me how he came by it, but it was soon gone, for that’s the manner of man I am. Some folks’ destinies is to save, and some to spend, and I’m one of the spending ones. There’s no point in crying over what’s gone, but if I had my time again I’d have the forty pound and Maria, that was always agreeable to me, and be living at Bethnal and looking out for my opportunities. Else I’d be away in Prague or Hamburg with the Gentleman, living high, as we did in those days. But that’s all behind me. I ain’t a young man now, but I ain’t so very old neither, and there’s life in me yet as my friend Bob Grace can tell you, for when a man’s born a varmint he’s liable to remain one and that’s a fact. I’m not above stealing lives as well as property if the occasion demands it, and there’s a gentleman down in the eastern counties who could swear to that if you was to ask him. Truth to tell, I’m a sad man sometimes and could wish that I was back in Bethnal piling into Maria, and her with her poonts rolling everywhere and her legs a-wound around me, but that sort of thing doesn’t bear thinking about. Like the chap whose life I stole down in Suffolk, and seeing Janey in Whitechapel, and so I don’t, or not for long.

  NOTES

  I acknowledge the direct influence of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Jack London, Mary Mann, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, W. M. Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.