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Authors: Kenneth Cameron
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another of them headache powders?’
‘I’m all right.’
Atkins hesitated. ‘Your coat come back from Mrs Gosden’s. Also hat, gloves, stick. Also the derringer in the pocket.’ He raised his eyebrows - music-hall astonishment.
‘Somebody brought it?’
‘Commissionaire. Coat et cetera in a box. Carried the stick.’
In a box. Everything ends in a box.
‘Put the derringer in the hollow book.’
‘Already have.’
Denton started to ask if there had been any message with the coat, any reply to the apology he had sent Emma, but Atkins would of course have told him if there had been. In fact, the coat and hat were the message. They were the full stop at the end of a sentence - the compound sentence that had been his affair with Emma and was never to become a paragraph.
Chapter Five
Denton walked to his meeting with Munro - down to Holborn, along to the Holborn Viaduct, to Newgate Street, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Aldgate High Street - almost the whole width of the City. It was nearly evening, but the streets were banging with mechanical life - steam diggers clawing up the earth, steam cranes lifting bundles of wood and stone into the sky. London was a mythical beast that was tearing out its own innards and regrowing them in a new form - new streets, new buildings, new tunnels and railways. It was destroying - or hiding - what was sick or poor or weak or decayed and putting up the new, the vigorous, the aggressive. No wonder the directories couldn’t keep up with people like Mulcahy and Stella Minter: the city itself was flinging people from place to place.
He had spent his years in London walking as much as twenty miles a day, seldom less than eight or ten, Baedeker’s in his pocket. He had walked from his house to Richmond on one side, to the Lea on the other; he had crossed the Thames and walked down to Greenwich and up to Kew, and he had found this mechanical pulse of renewal everywhere. London for Denton, when he pushed Dickens out of his head, was a clatter of modernizing machines surrounded by a sea of mud where new suburbs pushed relentlessly outward, chewing up whole streets, whole towns, each one succeeded by a newer that made the earlier one instantly mature.
He was not afraid of places or people, although if he walked at night he went armed - hence the derringer in the forgotten topcoat. Now, he knew London tolerably well - well enough, at least, that he found, when he got to the Haymow, that he had stopped in it once for a drink when he was walking down to the Tower. The woman at the bar, the few other patrons, hadn’t been welcoming then - gentlemen didn’t go into public houses, weren’t welcome if they did, they had seemed to say. In fact, he’d learned a lesson from that visit to the Haymow. Gentlemen weren’t welcome, but Bohemians were; if he had worn a wider-brimmed American hat (a ‘cowboy hat’, Hench-Rose had once called it, although it in fact had a fairly narrow brim compared with some he’d seen) and no necktie, like the Bohemians at the Café Royal, he’d have been tolerated.
The Haymow was one of the old pubs, small and simple, with a bar that ran almost the length of the far wall but no divisions into saloon bar or public bar or private rooms or any of the other embellishments of the great public houses that had bloomed over the last quarter-century. It was cream-coloured inside, or had been before a layer of smoke had been laid over the paint, then layers of what seemed to be amber shellac over that, so that the walls were shiny where the lights caught them and glazed as brown as a Dutch painting. PC Catesby had said it was low, but Denton saw nothing very low except a few working-men, hats on, smoke in a cloud around them. Munro was sitting on a faded brown banquette against the wall, far around to the right from the door.
‘You found it,’ he said when Denton sat down.
‘PC Catesby gave meticulous directions.’ Catesby, he figured, had been trying
‘I’m all right.’
Atkins hesitated. ‘Your coat come back from Mrs Gosden’s. Also hat, gloves, stick. Also the derringer in the pocket.’ He raised his eyebrows - music-hall astonishment.
‘Somebody brought it?’
‘Commissionaire. Coat et cetera in a box. Carried the stick.’
In a box. Everything ends in a box.
‘Put the derringer in the hollow book.’
‘Already have.’
Denton started to ask if there had been any message with the coat, any reply to the apology he had sent Emma, but Atkins would of course have told him if there had been. In fact, the coat and hat were the message. They were the full stop at the end of a sentence - the compound sentence that had been his affair with Emma and was never to become a paragraph.
Chapter Five
Denton walked to his meeting with Munro - down to Holborn, along to the Holborn Viaduct, to Newgate Street, Cheapside, Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Aldgate High Street - almost the whole width of the City. It was nearly evening, but the streets were banging with mechanical life - steam diggers clawing up the earth, steam cranes lifting bundles of wood and stone into the sky. London was a mythical beast that was tearing out its own innards and regrowing them in a new form - new streets, new buildings, new tunnels and railways. It was destroying - or hiding - what was sick or poor or weak or decayed and putting up the new, the vigorous, the aggressive. No wonder the directories couldn’t keep up with people like Mulcahy and Stella Minter: the city itself was flinging people from place to place.
He had spent his years in London walking as much as twenty miles a day, seldom less than eight or ten, Baedeker’s in his pocket. He had walked from his house to Richmond on one side, to the Lea on the other; he had crossed the Thames and walked down to Greenwich and up to Kew, and he had found this mechanical pulse of renewal everywhere. London for Denton, when he pushed Dickens out of his head, was a clatter of modernizing machines surrounded by a sea of mud where new suburbs pushed relentlessly outward, chewing up whole streets, whole towns, each one succeeded by a newer that made the earlier one instantly mature.
He was not afraid of places or people, although if he walked at night he went armed - hence the derringer in the forgotten topcoat. Now, he knew London tolerably well - well enough, at least, that he found, when he got to the Haymow, that he had stopped in it once for a drink when he was walking down to the Tower. The woman at the bar, the few other patrons, hadn’t been welcoming then - gentlemen didn’t go into public houses, weren’t welcome if they did, they had seemed to say. In fact, he’d learned a lesson from that visit to the Haymow. Gentlemen weren’t welcome, but Bohemians were; if he had worn a wider-brimmed American hat (a ‘cowboy hat’, Hench-Rose had once called it, although it in fact had a fairly narrow brim compared with some he’d seen) and no necktie, like the Bohemians at the Café Royal, he’d have been tolerated.
The Haymow was one of the old pubs, small and simple, with a bar that ran almost the length of the far wall but no divisions into saloon bar or public bar or private rooms or any of the other embellishments of the great public houses that had bloomed over the last quarter-century. It was cream-coloured inside, or had been before a layer of smoke had been laid over the paint, then layers of what seemed to be amber shellac over that, so that the walls were shiny where the lights caught them and glazed as brown as a Dutch painting. PC Catesby had said it was low, but Denton saw nothing very low except a few working-men, hats on, smoke in a cloud around them. Munro was sitting on a faded brown banquette against the wall, far around to the right from the door.
‘You found it,’ he said when Denton sat down.
‘PC Catesby gave meticulous directions.’ Catesby, he figured, had been trying
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