by Peter Carey
“Even if they had been stolen, it would mean nothing to me. Other events have put it in a better perspective.”
“Yes, little John will soon be quite well again, it seems.”
She looked at his face, and saw that he had not the faintest notion of the emotions agitating her. “He was a brave little man,” she said cautiously. “It is of that general subject that I wished to speak with you, dear Toby.”
He faced her solemnly.
“Say it, dearest.”
“Say what, dear Brother.”
“Say it.”
“Husband,” she said, and he, hearing that forbidden word, embraced her once again, smothering her in kisses.
“Do you love me, Husband?”
“You know I do. You know it so.”
“And love all that is mine?”
“The parings from your lovely fingernails.”
“And . . .”
“Here, I give you a kiss for your thoughts.”
She disengaged. “I am afraid that my thoughts will not be acceptable to you, my dearest.”
“Oh Lizzie,” he chided. “How can you say such a thing to me?”
“For my thoughts are of our child . . .”
“Sweetness, that cannot be.”
“But Toby, it can, and is.”
He stepped back from her.
“My God, Lizzie, what are you saying?”
“I knew you would not like my thoughts. You should not have inquired after them.”
“Lizzie, do not tease me.”
“I am not teasing, Husband.”
“What are you imagining?”
“Imagining?” Her voice rose. “Nothing. Nothing in the least imagined. Nothing, at least, you could not have imagined on the day you helped me fold the counterpane.”
They were talking thus, in low, agitated voices, when they became aware of a sputtering light making its way down the staircase. The light came towards them, like a spirit, washing over the floor outside the door, then announced a plump figure in a white night gown.
Mary stood in the doorway. The light from her candle revealed her sister still standing in the darkness by the window. Tobias was leaning against the mantel, but as his wife came further into the room, he offered his own unlit candle to her flame.
“Tobias? Are you squabbling with Lizzie?”
“It’s nothing, my dear.”
“But Lizzie, you’re crying.”
And indeed, as Lizzie saw her good dull sister come towards her, her round little face all drawn with concern, she knew she could not stem the tide of her own very great upset. Huge hot tears washed down her cheeks.
Mary put her plump arm around her shoulder. “What is it, dear little Lizzie?”
“My necklace,” cried Lizzie.
“What happened to her necklace, Tobias?”
“He let the filthy doctor steal it. He let the dirty old man put it in his pocket. He did not stop him. He did not care.”
“I did care,” said Tobias, hotly. “I cared most dreadfully.”
“He did not care,” cried Lizzie. “He cares only for his own pleasure.”
This last remark produced a long and peculiar silence. “Tobias, is this true?” asked Mary, finally.
“The doctor did take the necklace, but only as security against the fee.”
“He was a horrible old man,” said Mary. “I shall take it very hard with Grieves when next I see him, that we should put our little boy in the hands of such a . . . such a pawnbroker. Tobias, you must get Lizzie her necklace back.”
Lizzie looked to Tobias, who was resting his elbow, rather unnaturally, on the mantelpiece. He had always appeared to her as fierce and fatherly, but now she saw how the mantel was too tall for him, and how he stretched to accommodate himself to its demands. It was a vision most profoundly discouraging, and one she wished to God she had not seen.
55
WHEN TOBIAS OATES WAS five years old, his father was charged with killing a man named Judd in a tavern brawl in Wardour Street. John Oates was tried at the Old Bailey and condemned to death by hanging.
Toby’s earliest memories of London were still locked in that fetid little death cell where his father sat writing, day and night, getting up petitions for his pardon.
The Newgate turnkeys were fond of “John the Cock” and brought him pie and beer aplenty, so it happened that Toby, on being admitted to his company, would often find him in an emotional state. Sometimes the emotion was up, and sometimes it was down, and when it was down he would fall upon his estranged wife and son, crying to them that he did not wish to die.
All this, naturally enough, made its impressions on the little boy.
Finally his father won his pardon which, as his wife said, “did his character no good,” and from that time he settled in Soho, where he became a kind of celebrity amongst the jockeys and book-makers of the town.
In later years, Tobias came to believe that his father had most likely been guilty of Judd’s murder. In the popular newspapers much had been made of the bulk and brutality of the deceased man and the diminutive size of the accused, and yet this disparity in strength was, as Toby knew, a prescription for aggressive action on his father’s part.
John Oates believed that you must meet with what was frightening you. If it was a dark corner, you entered it. If it was a bucking horse, you mounted it. If it was a storm, you walked through it. And Tobias, who was almost exactly his father’s height, also inherited his habit of confronting what he feared.
He feared poverty; he wrote passionately about the poor. He had nightmares about hanging; he sought out executions, reporting them with a magistrate’s detachment. And on that dreadful day when Mr Spinks had died, when he learned that the beautiful child with whom he was besotted was herself with child, as bruised and violent clouds began to rise above the pacific horizon of his life, his strongest impulse was to go where he most feared the deluge would sweep him.
That night he slept in a low lodging house in Fox Court, very close by his home. He had been there previously to report its desperate condition for the Chronicle, but never had he laid his body down on one of those stinking palliasses. It was an exceedingly low sort of place, with a nest of rambling dormitories, and smaller rooms arranged around a central court which was slippery with the effluent of a drain. Here a raspy-voiced old fellow in an apron demanded a penny ha’penny, and showed Tobias to a large kind of cupboard—it had no windows—where a pair of ruffians lay amidst the smell of ale and onions.
Here the author of Captain Crumley feigned sleep while his roommates searched his clothes looking for valuables. They were brutish types, with heavy brows and thick wide noses, and he was therefore shocked to feel the gentle intimacy of their fingers as they searched under his pillow and beneath the thin coverlet. He felt their fingers move like rats across his body.
Then they left him alone and soon they were whispering and then, a little later, he realized they were enacting some foul business between them, groaning and cursing as they did so.
Finally they slept, and Tobias Oates crept out. This scene, or rather the specifics of its setting, reappears not only in The Death of Maggs and Michael Adams, but in almost everything Tobias Oates ever wrote. There is always the court with its vile green skirt of slime, the little room like a stifling cupboard, stinking of spilt ale and raw onions. You can find the peeling wallpaper, the porter’s egg-stained singlet, time and time again throughout his serials, and if that is the good he got from it, it was the only good. For Tobias Oates emerged into High Holborn with his fears not beaten, but magnified, and a great certainty that he would rather drown himself than take his family down into such purgatory.
Yet once it was known that he had betrayed his wife and ruined her young sister, who would ever wish to touch a book with his name upon its spine? As he wandered down to the Thames, then through Borough, he was, in his imagination, already that reviled creature who could never hold his head up again; he would be poor, an
d hated. He walked the echoing streets thinking of money like that famous miser he would one day create in French Street. The miser is more like his creator than his readers ever guessed. True, Tobias did not have Scotty Meggitt’s wealth, but he now walked the same streets Scotty Meggitt walked in the first chapter of French Street , adding and subtracting, subtracting and adding, just like another man might say his prayers.
Yet no matter how he did his sums Tobias could not get a total above eight pounds and sixpence. It was not enough. Not nearly enough.
Dawn found him still abroad on new London Bridge and, as the poisonous old ink received its first wash of red from the sun, he realized that the new bridge had been built atop the warren of streets where the Somnambulist spent his early years.
Pepper Alley Stairs were gone. The remaining roof tops were all grey and pink and shining in the morning drizzle. It was beneath his feet that the venomous creatures of Jack Maggs’s memories lived. Here Tom dragged his bloody scraps up those grey glistening steps which still existed in the subterranean passages of that Criminal Mind. Seeing these visions, he also glimpsed the greatness of his book. That is: he had a premonition of the true majesty of the work that he would one day write. And how did he value this portent? Why, like a pawnbroker. He examined this great novel with his jeweller’s glass. He might contrive to sell the copyright of such a work, and sell it entire, today, with not a word yet written.
It was not yet six in the morning—too early to do business with a publisher—but the prospect of this radical transaction now brought some colour to his cheeks. He set off, walking briskly, anxious to snaffle every pound that might be due him. As he crossed London Bridge again, the barges of the vegetable men were moving against the tide up to Covent Garden. Yes, it was too early to call on Cheery Entwhistle, but not too early to present himself to the man who had yesterday offered a fortune for a Thief-taker’s address.
Like old man Meggitt, Tobias did not yet know exactly how his money might protect him, where he might flee, what bulwark he might build against the storm, but at seven o’clock he knocked at Mr Buckle’s door keen to do business with Jack Maggs.
He was received by the kitchen maid, now dressed in mourning for Mr Spinks.
“There you are, Sir,” cried she, in a manner unpleasantly familiar. “I was about to come and fetch you.”
And with no other explanation she led him, not to the drawing room, but up an empty gloomy staircase which, in a better regulated household, would have been illuminated by a decent lamp.
The little maid was, to judge from her voice, soon an entire floor ahead of him. “This way, Sir. It’s very bad, very bad indeed.”
Tobias Oates, now much confused, grasped the banister and set off to catch her up. He would simply have increased his pace but he was prevented from so doing by the treacherous irregularity of the treads.
The house was queerly empty and lifeless. It was also taller than he had imagined, and so poorly served by windows that when he arrived on the second landing, he did not see the footman until the latter had thrust a paper into his hand. Tobias started, and cried out.
“I beg your pardon,” whispered Edward Constable. “I don’t know what to tell Mr Maggs, Sir. I don’t know what is right.”
Toby peered at the paper in his hand, but could make out nothing in the gloom.
“Up here, Sir,” called the maid.
Tobias turned to the footman, but found him gone. He pocketed the paper and set off again to the top floor, only knowing it to be such by the exceedingly low ceiling on which he bumped his head. Hearing a whisper ahead of him, he followed it glumly towards its source.
Dear God, another servant dead!
A door opened, and a feeble grey sort of daylight came out onto the landing. Negotiating around what appeared to be a great many rolled-up rugs, he stepped into a stuffy attic room.
He had feared to find Mrs Halfstairs or Miss Mott, but now he recognized the great lumpy body of the man he had come to get his fifty pounds from. Tobias immediately noted the queer waxy skin upon his cheek. It was that damned tic douloureux.
He peeled the grey rug slowly back. There, stripped of his only comfort, Jack Maggs whimpered like a child.
“Good morning, Jack Maggs.”
On hearing his voice, Maggs tried to raise himself. He appeared to be fully dressed, even to the hessian boots still on his feet, but he was very sick indeed. He peered at his visitor through swollen eyelids.
“It’s you, Sir?”
“It is Mr Oates.”
“You’ll find me Henry Phipps after all?” he asked pathetically. “That’s all I need, and then I’m off.”
“Fifty pounds, that’s what’s agreed? I’ll get you to the Thief-taker.”
“That’s the man.” He clutched at Toby’s sleeve. “Then I’m away. I’ll trouble you no more. Cash in your hand, and leave you in peace. God, this damned thing hurts, Sir. It’s this bleeding Phantom that you talk of.”
“You can get the fifty pounds today?”
The sick man tried to raise himself again, but failed. He lay back down upon his mattress with his hand across his eyes. “Give me a moment, give me a moment.”
“Very well. Let us drive out the Phantom first.”
Tobias was exceptionally tired himself, but he leaned across the bed and began the long process of magnetizing the patient. It was awkward to have a prone subject but they were both well-practised in the dance. Tobias made the passes artfully and Jack Maggs’s head soon fell back onto the pillow.
Tobias dragged up a three-legged stool and arranged himself, knees up, like a passenger on a wherry. His stomach rumbled. He drew breath, closed his eyes. When he spoke his voice was flat, without enthusiasm.
“What can you see?”
“Nothing. Darkness.”
“You can see the Phantom.”
“Can’t see through a bleeding brick wall, can I.”
Tobias allowed himself a weary smile. With Jack Maggs, there was always an obstacle—a wall, a moat, a bridge—some impediment which must be crossed to enter the castle of the Criminal Mind.
“Then we’ll take a brick out, Jack. We’ll wear away the mortar and see what we can see.”
“Not worth the trouble, mate. You take my word for it.”
“Don’t lie to me, man. You know where it is. You know what is on one side and on the other.”
Jack Maggs curled his lip, but did not answer.
“Take out the brick.”
“Take my word, Sir, it can’t be done.”
“Jack Maggs, I order you. Take out the brick.”
“Damn you,” cried the sick man, struggling in his bed. “Do not make me see what has been done.”
Tobias leaned forward on his stool. “Show it to me,” he demanded.
No answer. Then, suddenly: “Sophina. She is heart-broken.”
This was not what the Magnetist was looking for. He already had some forty pages of copperplate, all of them concerned with Jack Maggs’s love of Sophina Smith, and he did not, at this moment when he was dirty and weary and waiting for his fifty pounds, want to hear any more.
“Then Sophina will remove the brick from the wall.”
“There is no wall.”
“There is a brick wall right behind Sophina. Remove a brick.”
But the Somnambulist was deep in his rut.
“Look how she takes Tom’s hand. Look how he pretends to comfort her.”
“Jack, the Phantom is lurking on the other side of that brick wall.”
“I will not look. I couldn’t bear it.”
“Here’s Tom. He has a chisel, he is scraping away at the mortar.”
“He will make me look, the bastard. I’ll shut my eyes.”
“The brick is out.”
The large man on the bed began to whimper, and brought his hand up to his face.
“Move your hands back from your eyes. Is it not the Phantom?”
And, indeed, Jack did reluctantly remove his
hands, and open his eyes and stare hard at the dull rain-speckled window of the room. What he saw there, he did not say, but released a wail, so long and dreadful, that the writer, listening to it, bowed his head and shut his eyes.
56
THE CONVICT WRITHED against his magnetic chains. He sat up, straining forward, his dark eyes glaring bright as gin. Tobias had entered this transaction only to collect his fifty pieces, but now all thought of gain was put aside.
“Hold,” he cried, and stood pluckily before Jack Maggs, his legs astride, his hand thrust forward as if to parry or to bless.
Jack Maggs seemed to look at him, but who could say what world he saw with those wild eyes?
“Hold now, Jack. Hold.” The writer brought his soft palms to press down on the air between himself and his subject. As he pushed out his hands, Jack Maggs partially reclined upon his crib. Determined to insist on his mastery, Tobias came a half-step closer. Jack Maggs would not surrender entirely but lay propped on his elbow, like a great loaded spring. He was held, magnetized, though Tobias lacked confidence in the strength of this instrument.
The next moment made him fear the battle lost. Jack Maggs opened his wide mouth and cried not in pain, but in horror at some unseen thing. As a great “No!” burst from deep in his chest, he stood, not quickly, but as Gulliver might have, had he been better able to resist the ropes of the Lilliputians. When erect, his great high forehead touched the ceiling. He seemed to fill the room, blocking the light: it took every reserve of courage for Tobias to stand his ground against him.
“Down,” cried Tobias Oates. “I command you.”
He feared he had done something against the natural order, had unleashed demons he had no understanding of, disturbed some dark and dreadful nest of vermin. He tried to see, without removing his eyes from the subject, if there were some stave or poker with which to arm himself.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you be still.”
Jack Maggs paused, blinked.
“Quiet,” Tobias cried. “You will be quiet.”
The patient swayed, stooped over, in the middle of the attic, rubbing at his unshaven cheek.
