Why couldn’t I be born like Mr Chaplin? John asked himself, envying the great man’s splendid self-assurance. Or Billy?
The mongrel tried whining hopefully and wagging his tail.
‘Oh come along, then,’ John said, resigning himself to charity, which was at least something he was capable of. ‘You shall have a mutton chop, I suppose. There’s no point in both of us being miserable.’
So the mongrel had his chop and two days later John Easter had his reward.
It was a brief note and businesslike, written in a bold flowing hand and signed with a flourish.
‘I have perused the proposition of A. Easter & Sons,’ it said, ‘and wish to make the following remarks upon it, viz:-
‘1) that should it be agreed upon, Mr Easter would undertake to ascertain whether the coachmen are agreeable to it.
‘2) that Mr Easter should consider the offer of a bonus to the coachmen and the company to be payable on such occasions when punctuality was particularly essential.
‘3) that Mr Easter should entirely understand that no coach would ever delay departure for the arrival of his newspapers. Which being so it would be entirely Mr Easter’s responsibility to ensure that the papers should arrive at their point of departure from London in adequate time.
‘I have the honour to be Mr Easter’s obedt servt.
‘William Chaplin.’
John read it through at once and very quickly, his heart swelling with excitement and hope. But the answer he was looking for seemed to have eluded him. Had Mr Chaplin agreed or not? He read it again, this time very slowly and with great attention. But he was still baffled. Paper in hand he set off along the long corridor to consult Cosmo Teshmaker.
‘Do we have a bargain, think ’ee?’ he asked, as the lawyer began to read the letter.
Mr Teshmaker read on studiously, paused to consider, and then gave his cautious approximation to an affirmative reply. ‘Given that you are able to satisfy the gentleman upon all three of his conditions, I should venture to say it would be likely,’ he said, handing back the paper.
‘In that case, I shall put my mind to it at once,’ John said. And did.
By a piece of singular good fortune, Nan Easter had left London that very morning to travel to York, where she was negotiating for two new shops and a reading-room, and she’d told her sons, very firmly, before her departure, that she indended to stay there until all three deals were satisfactorily completed. So this time John had the chance to complete his own deal without her.
First he wrote a carefully phrased letter to Mr Chaplin commending his ‘admirable suggestion that a bonus be paid for necessary punctuality’ and suggesting that they should meet, ‘as soon as is mutually possible’ to discuss terms. As to the coachmen, he said it had always been his intention to deal directly with all those ‘involved in our enterprise’ (a neat touch, that ‘our’), as he had already done, ‘with some success’ on the East Anglian routes. (Oh, the pride of that modest understatement!) Then he assured his ‘esteemed friend and colleague’ that no coach would ever be kept waiting on account of any delivery from A. Easter and Sons, and signed the letter in the usual way but with a splendid sense of a job well done.
Then he went out into the Strand, where the cobbles were already unpleasantly crowded in the September sunshine, determined to solve the problem of getting his papers from the printing houses to Mr Chaplin’s coaching inns in the shortest possible time. And discovered the fourpenny flyers.
They were everywhere he looked: small, dapper, two-horse carriages, carrying a single passenger at breakneck speed, and positively darting along beside the cumbersome progress of hansoms and cabriolets and all those heavy town chaises that were clogging the road. He watched with delight as one of them sleeked through the little space between two trundling carts and set off at a gallop towards Temple Bar. Fourpenny flyers! Of course. Why hadn’t he thought of them before? He could have teams of them standing ready outside the Post Office, to take the papers the moment they were stamped. At fourpence a time they would be expensive, that was undeniable, but they would be trustworthy, and that was what would count when he was short of time.
He stood by the side of the road and waited until the next flyer appeared, and was delighted when the driver agreed to his proposal almost at once.
‘Ain’t a deal a’ work available that time a’ mornin’,’ the man said. ‘’Ow many was yer wantin’, sir, if I may make so bold?’
Rapid calculations. ‘Ten to start with. More later.’
‘Leave it ter me, guv,’ the driver said. ‘You shall ’ave ’em by termorrer.’
And he was as good as his word. Rather better, in fact, for he arrived in the Post Office yard at five-thirty the next morning with a dozen of his friends. They made an impressive cavalcade, and dispatched the news with all speed and considerable noise. It was rather exciting, John thought, feeling proud of his achievement. The only disappointment was that there was so little news for them to carry and, what was worse, the demand for it was diminishing by the day.
Nevertheless, by the time his mother returned from York, well pleased with her endeavours there, the machinery had been set in operation, the punctuality bonus negotiated with Mr Chaplin to the satisfaction of both parties, and A. Easter and Sons were all set to be first with the news, the minute there was any news to be first with.
It was a disappointment to John that she didn’t seem to understand what good work he’d done.
‘My heart alive!’ she roared at him when he presented the weekly accounts to her. ‘What’s this? Four shillings a day for flyers! Do you mean to beggar us, Johnnie? Or en’t you in your right senses? What do we want with flyers?’
‘We need them for their speed, Mama,’ he said. ‘To be first with the news, you know. They are standing ready to take the latest news the moment it arrives.’
‘Our own vans do that.’
‘But they couldn’t do it so quickly. If news broke suddenly we need to distribute it as quickly as we can.’
‘And how often does news break like that?’ she demanded. ‘Once a month, if that.’
‘It could be more often now.’
‘Or less. No, Johnnie, our trade is down, and thanks to you our expenses are up. You will cancel all these unnecessary flyers this very afternoon, so you will.’
He was appalled. What a thing to ask him to do, after all the effort he’d put into collecting them and organizing them. ‘I understood that I was to be a manager of this firm,’ he said coldly.
‘Aye, so you are.’
‘Then pray allow me to manage, Mama.’
‘You may manage the sales for the firm,’ his mother said, ‘but I own it, don’t ’ee forget. And if we’re to make a profit overall, which I fully intend to see we do, then those flyers must be cancelled. We en’t paying them to stand around doing nothing.’
‘What if news were to break all on a sudden?’ he said, pale with the effort it was taking to control himself.
‘Why then ’twould break and we would profit by it.’
‘But if we miss the coaches …’ he tried, trembling with the injustice of it. Couldn’t she see what a terrible thing she was asking him to do?
But she wouldn’t hear him. ‘The flyers go,’ she ordered. ‘And you’d best be off to the York road tomorrow to find shops. At least that’s a thing you can do with some semblance of economy. You en’t within the bounds of understanding, and that’s a fact. Four shillings a day for flyers to stand about doing nothing. ’Tis rank exorbitance, so ’tis!’
‘He can’t go tomorrow, Mama,’ Billy said mildly, helping himself to more wine. ‘We travel to Bury tonight for the Ottenshaws’ party.’
‘And Miss Honeywood will be there, I daresay,’ Nan grinned at him, humour restored. ‘Oh very well, but you’d best make an early start on Monday, Johnnie.’
‘I would go tonight should you wish it,’ he told her, wanting nothing more than to get away as quickly as he could from her injust
ice. Besides, he had no desire to attend a party. What if that dreadful Lizzie had been invited too? Even the thought of it was insupportable.
But his mother was no help to him in this matter either. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Go to Bury. Enjoy yourself. ’Twill improve your humour. All work and no play, you know. Now then, Mr Teshmaker, show me the London accounts.’
He caught the first coach to York the very next morning. His mother could say what she pleased, he would live his own life. If he wasn’t allowed to hire the flyers he would open up new routes. It would keep him away from the dreadful Lizzie and his mother’s authority, and besides this was the part of his job that he did best. And he was so cross that he was full of energy.
By Christmas he had opened shops in Tadcaster, Ferrybridge, Doncaster and Selby, as he was happy to report when he returned to Bedford Square to join the family celebrations. And after Christmas he set off again, this time for St Albans to open another shop there. And after St Albans, Reading and Maidenhead and Newbury, and so on along the road to Bath.
The weather was excessively cold and travel excessively difficult, but he was determined. By the end of January he had moved on to Marlborough, and in the middle of February he arrived in the little market town of Chippenham. By then his solitary existence had become habitual. He was used to eating lonely suppers before scorching fires in wayside inns, to sleeping – or not sleeping – in damp beds in damper rooms, to travelling stiff with cold despite being swathed in shawls and mufflers and sustained by frequent flasks of brandy and hot water. His rewards were newly opened shops and increased profits and his mother’s occasional praise.
But the Angel in Chippenham turned out to be the most comfortable of all the inns he’d sampled on his long, cold journey. It was a large inn, built to accommodate the ever-growing number of coaches that passed through the town on their way from London to Bath, and to provide meat and drink to the local traders who gathered there on market days, high days and holidays, but at this time of year few people stayed more than a hour or two, and coaches only ran twice a week, so John had the place virtually to himself, which was extremely agreeable. So he decided to stay there and make the place his headquarters while he worked through all the towns in the area. The food was wholesome to eat, the beds were warm, for once, and he had Mr Wordsworth’s poetry for company.
He had bought a copy of Mr Wordsworth’s newly published poem, ‘The Excursion’, just before he left London and was finding it very much to his taste in this self-imposed exile of his. It was a long poem, in ten books, and was the story of a travelling poet, with a great admiration for nature and the countryside, of course, who met up with a philosopher called the Wanderer and had now, in the second book, encountered a marvellously pessimistic character called the Solitary, who could have been modelled on John Easter himself, for he was described as having ‘a pale face’ and being ‘a tall and meagre person’ and was given to wondering ‘wherefore was I born?’ and to expressing sad, noble sentiments. It gave John a frisson of the most exquisitely miserable pleasure to read such things, and when he discovered that his hero wore ‘a faint sarcastic smile’ he decided that he too would acquire the same accomplishment, and use it the next time his mother criticized the flyers. He spent several minutes at the end of every day practising sarcastic smiles by candlelight in his dressing table mirror.
In fact, in a perverse way, he was enjoying his stay in Chippenham. As far as he was concerned the winter and the work and the peace and quiet of Chippenham could go on for ever and ever. So he was rather put out when he was woken early one morning by a terrible hullabaloo outside his window. He was well-used to the clop and snort of a passing horse or the occasional voice raised in greeting, but now there were carts and horses by the score, grinding the cobbles to thunder, and people hammering and shouting, and children squabbling, and babies crying, and cocks crowing, and pigs squealing, and the noise was enough to split skulls.
‘What is it?’ he asked the chambermaid, when she brought up his early morning tea.
‘Why ’tis the fair,’ she told him happily, gazing at it from the window. ‘First fair of the year, sir. First week in March. There’s stalls from all over, an’ a shambles jest across the way, d’ye see, fer the freshest o’ meat. What a piece o’ good fortune for you, sir, to be here for the fair.’
He was up, washed, shaved, dressed and packed within twenty minutes. There was a stagecoach running to Bath early that morning and he intended to catch it. Under no circumstances could he share his peaceful retreat with a fair. Whatever it was like, Bath was bound to be more congenial than that.
But, as it turned out, he was wrong.
They reached the top of Kingsdown Hill at a little after nine o’clock that morning, and stopped to give the horses a breather before their long descent into the city. It was one of those dank miserable days, when the world is drained of colour and lungs are suffused with moisture. The newly grown catkins were quite sodden and hung from their black branches like small clothes pegged to dry. The sky was like a damp sheet, heavy and dirty-white and massively wrinkled. Even the sun looked apologetic, pale as the moon and shrunk to half its size.
The passengers stood about coughing dismally and taking the occasional swig from their hip flasks in a vain attempt to garner a little warmth. And below them the city of Bath lay in a hollow between the damp hills, almost entirely obscured by swirling clouds of greeny-white vapour. To John’s travel-jaundiced eyes it looked like some huge steaming cistern where small black figures bobbed into view, as though they were being boiled, to swim and struggle for a second before being sucked into the muck again. Here and there through the mists he caught a glimpse of a pale yellow wall, or the honeycombed mullions of an abbey or the corner of some grand parade where miniature sedan chairs jogged and bounced and dark coaches rolled in and out of the mist, but it was a dispiriting view.
‘What a ghastly place!’ he said to his companion, a cheerful middle-aged man who had introduced himself as Mr Bourne.
‘’Tis the mist makes it so,’ Mr Bourne observed, rearranging his muffler about his nose and mouth. ‘In fair weather ’tis a fine fair city and uncommon good for one’s health.’
John found that very hard to believe and was beginning to have quite serious doubts about the advisability of this visit. But it was too late to change his mind. The horses were rested and it was time to descend into the cauldron. Perhaps, he thought, trying to cheer himself as the drags were adjusted, it will improve upon closer acquaintance.
It got worse. As the mist gradually enveloped them, the outside passengers were chilled to the bone, and soon they were all coughing and spluttering and wiping their eyes and blowing their noses, and wishing themselves anywhere but where they were.
But at last they reached the city and came to a steaming halt in Stall Street outside the White Hart Inn, and opposite an imposing colonnade which, so his new friend told him, led to the entrance to the Baths themselves. And John got his first appalled view of the inhabitants.
They were all old, all deformed, all cripples! And as noisy as crows. Either being carried into the place in bath chairs, swathed in bandages, pale-faced and complaining, and clinging like grim death to the greasy thongs that swung beside their ears, or being wheeled out of it, still swathed in bandages, but this time boiled red as lobsters and limp with heat exhaustion. He’d never seen such a hideous collection in his life.
I will have breakfast, he vowed, and then I will buy a map of the town, decide upon the most suitable site for our shop, rent it with all speed, and travel on to Bristol on the very first coach out.
The breakfast was surprisingly good, the map was informative, the choice of sites obvious, but the renting office was closed, and according to a neat notice hung on its clammy door would not be open until eight of the clock the following morning. He would have to stay a day in the city after all.
His fellow passengers were still in the coffee room of the White Hart when he came dripping back
to join them.
‘Ah!’ Mr Bourne said, ‘there you are. We waited for you, d’ye see. We’re all off to take the waters, since it seems that everybody takes the waters or bathes at this hour. They say the Pump Room is splendid. Just the place to be, what?’
‘If I take any more water I shall turn into a sponge,’ John said. But at least it was one way of passing the time. So he went.
The Pump Room was really rather a handsome place. It was a long room, decorated in the best fashion in duck-egg blue, white and gold, and beautifully proportioned, with five long windows on either side divided from each other by Corinthian columns painted white and gilded gold. It was full of people and there were invalid chairs and their impatient patients pushing and shoving in every direction, but there were two good fires to warm them and a fine band to play to them.
‘Have a glass of Spa water, my dear friend,’ Mr Bourne said, pressing one into John’s hand. ‘There’s a seat for us by the inner windows. I’ve sent my man to secure it. Just the place, what?’ And although John had no desire to take the waters, he took the glass and followed his new friend’s broad shoulders towards the inner windows.
‘Your very good health, sir,’ he said to Mr Bourne. And he sipped his metallic water, found it extremely disagreeable and turned his head to look through the window so as to avoid drinking any more of it.
And he found he was gazing straight down into one of the baths, an ancient stone pit filled with water as thick and green as pea soup, and steaming. And bobbing about in it were scores of people, some young and slender, others old and extraordinary: bald-headed men without teeth and billowing women without stays, tumbling together in the steam, wearing sulphur-yellow nightcaps above steam-red faces and sulphur-yellow nightgowns below. He had never seen anything so gross. But the fascination of the sight was so intense that he watched on, intrigued.
And one of the fat women suddenly rolled over in the water and turned up her eyes and gave a roar, flailing so wildly that she knocked several of her nearest companions into the water. Then, still roaring, she began to sink, her yellow gown slowly filling with air like a balloon. He watched with passing interest as two attendants arrived and dragged her rather unceremoniously to the water’s edge. Then he looked back idly at the other bathers who were still struggling and floundering in the water. One of them appeared to be fainting, for she was drooping over the arms of her slender companion and her cap was drifting away from her on the scummy water. A rather odd-looking cap, he thought, watching it, for there were bunches of false curls attached to it on either sides. False yellow curls, rather like old Miss Pettie’s.
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