Death and Mr. Pickwick (19 page)

‘I'd be surprised if the eels are still alive after a look from that woman,' whispered Seymour. ‘No need at all to knap 'em on the head after a squint from her.'

‘I suggest you stop casting leers at our tattooed friend,' whispered Wonk. ‘Have a look at cribbage-face in the corner instead to dampen your appetite. He's a cure for wanton loins, if ever there was one.'

Seymour cast a glance over his shoulder. There was a man with multiple scar pits all over his face. ‘One for my cousin Edward's catalogue of deformities, for sure,' said Seymour. But the man had noticed Seymour looking. He stood up and came to the table.

‘Do you look at me, boy?'

‘No more than any other man,' said Seymour.

‘You do not need to pretend.' He pointed aggressively at his own face. ‘Two shots in the throat. Five more around the right eye. Fifteen more all around. It's a miracle my sight was spared. I might have had my brains blown out! All because some young hobbledehoy thought it amusing to go shooting for sparrows.'

‘I can but commiserate,' said Seymour, ‘and remind you that all men have scars of one form or another, and urge you to take up hobbledehoy hunting when the season for that sport begins.'

The man grunted at Seymour, apparently unable to think of a reply, and returned to his corner.

Seymour whispered to Wonk: ‘Why don't we go hobbledehoy hunting ourselves?'

‘Where?'

‘The Roman Encampment. Bound to be some there.'

The area of Islington known to locals as the Roman Encampment was a hundred-foot rectangular mound surrounded by a deep ditch, providing a view of open country, ponds and scattered houses. As the Romans
could
have used it, this meant that they did.

Seymour and Wonk climbed a rampart to the top, passing near an overgrown well in the ditch. They looked out and watched a youth – one of a group of several on the verge of manhood, and all carrying guns – who attempted to hit a wood pigeon in flight. There was a bang and a curse.

‘He aimed too long,' said Seymour. ‘He dulled the reactions in his trigger finger.'

‘You sound knowledgeable.'

‘Common sense. I have been thinking we should get guns ourselves.'

There were cries suddenly of ‘Brilliant shot!' and ‘Bravo!' as another young sportsman brought a pigeon down.

‘No man is more susceptible to soaping than a shooter,' said Seymour. ‘All the misses are forgotten.'

The two sat on the grass at the top of the mound, and Seymour drew a young man aiming a gun at a small bird sitting on a fence, saying to another young man, in a caption: ‘Out of the way, Sugarlips, I'm sure I shall hit him this time.'

‘Well, Sugarlips,' he said to Wonk when the drawing was finished, ‘the herd of hobbledehoys has moved on. Shall we too?'

They descended and wandered around Islington, before taking the footpath to Copenhagen House, enjoying the smell of hay and the sight of the smart young men strolling near the hedges, decked out in their Sunday waistcoats, with their shining hair and their equally shining boots.

Afterwards, they sat in the tea garden of the White Conduit Inn, watching the way such men sat with those boots upon the tables.

‘Now he is a
monstrous
pretty little creature,' said Seymour, indicating a fellow with an especial love of show, who flourished an embroidered silk handkerchief like a banner, and sipped tea. ‘I could sketch his sort for ever.'

‘I am still concerned about whether we will earn enough,' said Wonk.

‘Do I worry about becoming gallows poor? No. I could sketch him, or someone else in this inn, for the price of a tankard of cooler, a penny bread and a penny plate of potatoes.'

‘The cares of this world don't make much impression on you, do they, Robert?'

‘You've seen me miserable. You have seen me
truly
low.'

‘But not for any particular reason.'

They moved on to the Albion, and spent half an hour watching evening cricketers. Then, at the Belvedere, they played on the bowling green – though, when Seymour lost, he protested that the liquor had affected his aim. They ordered a sixpenny plate of meat and vegetables with a view to sobering up for the next match, and they sat at a table in the fresh air as they ate. A coach passed, and, as it was so hot, all the passengers were sitting on the vehicle's roof, leaving the inside empty.

‘Vere's my insides?' said Seymour, imitating a coachman. ‘Vere's my insides? I've got to go vithout my insides.' Wonk laughed until his own insides hurt.

Eventually, they found their way back to Canonbury, Wonk carrying a jug of ale. They climbed the stairs with unsteady steps, and Wonk pushed Seymour into the cupboard outside their room, then stood against the door, barring exit. There came a hammering of fists from within, and laughing cries of ‘Let me out! I know you are stealing the ale!' Wonk smiled, opened the door, and the two entered their room.

‘Strange things, those cupboards,' said Wonk, after swilling directly from the jug, which he passed to Seymour, who promptly did the same. ‘Makes you think. Who else has been in these rooms in the past? And what have they stored in the cupboards?'

‘If cupboards could talk,' said Seymour.

*   *   *

A man with an expansive forehead, large ears and receding chin took a plate of crumpets from a Canonbury cupboard, which he used as a larder, and carried them into his room. This was Oliver Goldsmith, author, then working on
The Vicar of Wakefield
, who judged Canonbury Tower an excellent place to escape his creditors. In the room, sitting behind the teapot, thighs apart, was the hefty figure of his friend Dr Johnson. Goldsmith impaled a crumpet on a toasting fork, and soon Johnson chewed this morsel with such vigour the veins stood out on his head, while being entirely oblivious to the melted butter he had spilt down his front.

‘Well, sir, this is most agreeable,' said Johnson, ‘but crumpets and muffins never fail to remind me of my poor friend William Fitzherbert, the member for Derby. Fitzherbert
loved
buttered muffins but could not eat them – they disagreed with his stomach. So he resolved to shoot himself. He ate three buttered muffins for breakfast before putting a bullet in his head, knowing that he could not be troubled with indigestion.'

‘It would
perhaps
be more poetical to stab oneself with the toasting fork,' said Goldsmith with an artful smile.

*   *   *

‘Imagine a cupboard haunted by its previous users,' said Wonk, guzzling from the jug.

‘And the spirits exert an influence upon the affairs of the current occupiers of the tower,' said Seymour, taking the handle.

*   *   *

Washington Irving, creator of Rip Van Winkle, took a bottle of ink from the cupboard and entered the room. In Canonbury Tower, he hoped to be possessed by the very muse that had seized Goldsmith. The dark oak-panelled wainscoting, and the carved mantelpiece, induced an air of antiquity. He sat at the writing desk, and poured ink into the inkwell. He felt as snug as Robinson Crusoe when the latter had finished his bower. Irving lifted his quill. Unfortunately, a cricket match then decided to begin, which threatened to turn this Sunday into a day of unrest. Shouts from the spectators not only annoyed Irving, but evoked lines of Goldsmith that he had memorised, and loved in the past, but which now hovered in mockery:

Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,

Seats of my youth, when every sport could please.

Irving rose in annoyance, and looked out at the cricketers. They were playing single-wicket. The batsman hit a drive, ran to the bowler's stump – would he be out? To Irving's great annoyance, no. It was a sweltering day, but his hope that the heat would soon terminate the match was not to be fulfilled. It was
impossible
to bowl the batsman out.

Irving sat, quill poised again. The chair was uncomfortable. He rocked back and forth, and the wood creaked in a most irritating manner. He stood and leant against the wainscoting and looked at the chair. It was old, and leather-upholstered, and bandy-legged with claw feet, and was studded all over with brass nails. There was something extremely disconcerting about the appearance of that chair, as though designed to distract a man who was trying to write. ‘Should be a Windsor chair,' he thought to himself, attempting to settle again. ‘Nothing more comfortable than a Windsor.' Irving breathed in heavily and dipped his pen in the ink again.

There was a tap at the door. It was the landlady, accompanied by a bald, exhausted-looking man with green spectacles, and a woman, presumably his wife, with piercing blue almond-shaped eyes roving beyond Irving's shoulders.

‘They would like to see Goldsmith's room,' said the landlady, with a chesty cough, ‘if it is not too much trouble, sir.'

‘It is not only too much trouble, it is impossible. ‘He shut the door, and returned to his paper.

There were gritty movements of shoes outside the door, and whispering, and another cough – he heard the landlady say: ‘That'll be sixpence.' The grittiness came again, and turning in his seat, Irving realised an eye had been placed to the keyhole. ‘Go away!' he shouted to the eye.

During the next half-hour, cheers from the cricket field, and boots going up and down the stairs, halted Irving's progress. He heard a man's voice on the landing say: ‘Is it true that Francis Bacon planted the mulberry tree in the tower's garden?'

‘That's what they say, sir,' said the landlady's voice, ‘but do you know the mistake he made?'

‘No.'

‘It's a farthing to know, sir.'

‘Very well. What was it?'

‘He planted them to feed silkworms.' Cough. ‘But he planted the wrong mulberry, pink not white. And no silkworm would ever touch those. You can't fool a silkworm, sir.' Cough.

Exasperated, Irving stood up and threw back the door. ‘Why don't you learn the full story of Pyramus and Thisbe,' he said to the landlady, ‘and make a few pennies when you cough
that
tale.'

‘Pyramus and who, sir?' Cough.

‘I cannot write with this noise!' He left the room, shut the door behind him, turned the key and, walking past the landlady, hurried downstairs and out.

For several hours Irving strolled around London. He headed for the heart of the city. Even on a Sunday, there were earnest, busy men in the metropolis who found a smile too much trouble, who did not stop to chatter idly, or listen with any interest to anything. Here and there, though, was a flash of colour in a window box, or a single flower in a bottle on a ledge, or a small patch of grass, as though the Englishman's soul were repelled by so much city, and needed a speck of countryside.

Soon, Irving sat at a table in an inn and watched the people passing by. A strange being, an undernourished man with a deformed nose and bruised eyes that leered in two directions, came and chattered away to himself outside the window, as odd in speech as in face. Having had enough of this man, who showed no inclination to move on, Irving left the inn and wandered to a print shop, its brightly coloured pictures as relieving to the senses as the flowers he had noticed. He then resolved to head back to Canonbury, with the specific intention of writing a letter to his landlady, giving up the room as he could not work in such a place.

 

*

THEN SEYMOUR SAID TO WONK:
‘I haven't told you yet that two days ago, when I was carrying an easel through the streets, on my way here, a voice called out behind me, and it was someone I have mentioned to you – Joseph Severn.'

‘Oh, was it?' Wonk stood abruptly and lay upon the bed.

‘His married sister is letting him use a room in her house as a studio.'

‘Where?'

‘Goswell Street. He has invited me over next Sunday to see a painting he is working on. He says it is
most
important I come to see a preliminary version. He will also invite my cousins Edward and Jane. And he is keen to see Canonbury, Wonk, so he says everyone should walk over here afterwards, and then we could have a picnic in the fields.'

‘And where will I be when this is going on?'

‘I thought about pretending you were modelling for me. If Joseph had suggested coming here first, then we definitely could have done that. They could catch me in the middle of painting you, I could put down my brushes, and then we would all go out for a picnic. But unfortunately he wants me to go to Goswell Street first. The painting, whatever it is, is obviously in the forefront of Joseph's mind. I'm sorry, Wonk. I can see you are not pleased.'

‘I will just to have disappear for the day, I suppose.'

‘It is not my fault. As it is, we will have to hide the signs you are here. I cannot trust Edward. What we are would be – another deformity to him. He may not cause trouble himself, but eventually I think he would talk to someone. That's unsettling.'

‘And Jane?'

‘I don't think she has any conception of such things as us.'

‘And Joseph himself?'

‘I suspect he guesses my inclination. I confess I am not entirely discreet in my manner with him.'

‘You cannot help yourself.'

‘There is something of that, when I am with him. Do not look at me like that, Wonk. Let's forget about it for now, and finish the ale.'

‘You finish it. I am too tired. I've had enough liquor for one day. I am going to bed.'

*   *   *

Edward Holmes, a fellow of thick chestnut hair and bonny-babyish looks, placed himself in the middle of the sofa in the bay-windowed room in Goswell Street, directly opposite Joseph Severn's covered easel. His sister Jane sat to his left – she was not as pretty as her brother, for she had a broader nose and thinner lips, and if the two had swapped outfits and exchanged hairstyles, Edward could have convincingly played the sister, and Jane the brother. To the right of Holmes was Seymour, who sat in a lazy pose, one leg over the other, resting his temple on his knuckles, and his elbow on the sofa's back.