Death and Mr. Pickwick (51 page)

Though the meaning of this drawing was a mystery, the presence of two heavy-lidded men lolling at a wall impelled the father to hurry the boy on, by means of a hand in the middle of the back.

This drawing did not leave the boy's thoughts. In church, he fidgeted during the service. That night, he dreamt of a goblin.

*   *   *

He ran down the dimly lit alley, terrified the gnarled fingers would reach out and grab his shoulder. If he looked back, it seemed that the goblin was still attached to the door, a chalk drawing below the waist, living flesh above. Yet by some unexplained means the door could move of its own accord, and gave chase. Sometimes a chalked leg rose out of the wood, becoming solid in the air, and gave the door a bound upwards, and brought the goblin closer to the boy. Twice the hand caught his elbow and pulled him backwards towards some horrible fate – perhaps to be turned into a chalk drawing for ever, to take the goblin's place upon the door.

But the boy broke free, and was too fast. Then other goblins joined in the chase, thousands of cackling creatures, unattached to doors, but spilling out from St Mary's, which was lit up within, and then the church organ started, and he was running among the gravestones, and in confusion he headed inside the building by a side entrance, where he saw a goblin playing the organ – its long, uneven fingers stretched over more than an octave of keys and its terrible grin turned in his direction. Then he was running outside once more, down Red Cat Lane towards the river, looking behind every few moments. Still the horde of goblins came in pursuit.

*   *   *

He often thought of the goblin on nights when he could not sleep, and he recalled his intense horror as the drawing came alive. New details appeared to him as he relived those moments. He saw the hand emerging from the door, the flexing of the fingers as though stiff after an eternity as a drawing, and then it reached back to pluck the chalk pipe by the stem, which became solid clay, and the contents of its bowl glowed, and it moved towards the flesh of the boy's face, and he could feel the heat, hot as a poker, close, and closer, to his cheek.

The dream did not deter him from St Mary's. Of particular fascination was a cavern under the church. Like the other boys of the neighbourhood, he sought the entrance in a hillside close to the river. He carried a candle inside – anxious that it would be extinguished by a stray draught, perhaps of his own breath, and plunge him into darkness, after a glimpse of a grin.

Although hewn from chalk, the walls of the cavern had weathered into a grey-green joylessness. His footsteps echoed. There always seemed to be another turning. If he should fall asleep in the cavern, he imagined the goblins would descend upon him, and they would drag him down into even deeper caverns, perhaps all the way to hell itself.

Even when safe at home, playing on a rug before the fire, he was reminded of goblins, for the creatures were athletic and lithe and shared characteristics with certain toys he possessed. One was a carved acrobatic tumbler with hands in his pockets, who could not lie down but was weighted so that he would see-saw into sitting position. Then there was a cardboard man whose legs were moved by string and a particular tug would send them around his neck. This remarkable power of contortion was shared by the goblins he imagined, who would spin their legs at the groin, and put a right foot, shod with a pointed shoe, over a left shoulder, and then bring a left shoe towards the mouth, to nibble on the shoe's point. Another toy, a springing spotted-back frog, could even jump just like a goblin, and if the frog landed on the boy's hand, he shrieked.

*   *   *

Although he never forgot the sight of the goblin chalked upon the door, its influence gradually faded as he immersed himself in books.

There were the six volumes of
The Arabian Nights.
He marvelled at the remarkable assistance that genies could yield to their masters and that, all through the book, Scheherazade used her wonderful stories to prolong the king's interest and delay her own execution.

Then he was captured by the works of Fielding and, even more so, by those of Smollett. He
saw
the books' characters, truly saw them. When he passed an open barn outside the town, he imagined Smollett's Roderick Random, wounded, staggering inside to lay down among the straw. Then he imagined a countryman thrusting a pitchfork into that straw, the points just missing Roderick's head. In St Mary's churchyard, a dried-out branch blown across a grave after a storm became a thigh bone, brandished in a fight among graves in
Tom Jones
, and he was himself wielding the bone, which shattered into slivers as it landed above an inscription.

*   *   *

There was a more enduring suggestion of conflict, on the grandest scale, in the buildings of the area. Several miles of military fortifications, from Gillingham to Brompton, protected Chatham Dockyard from landward attack, and were known as the Chatham Lines. A battery or a drawbridge had been added every time invasion threatened, and to explain its purpose in detail, a small-scale model showing bastions, demibastions and ravelins, and a suitably enthusiastic veteran, would be of some assistance. Among the people of Chatham, however, ‘The Lines' had come to mean the four hundred square yards of open space next to the garrison, at the top of the hill overlooking the dockyard, where regiments would conduct reviews, manoeuvres and mock battles.

The fortifications at Chatham made a strange and excellent location for the boy to wander. There were vaults, with grates, and if he put his nose in he could smell decayed remains, or damp earth waiting to receive some. There were unexpected turnings, from which at any moment a high-spirited lad could jump on his shoulders and then run off.

In summer, boys played cricket on a nearby field while a youth and his sweetheart might lie in the trench near Fort Pitt, a recess which resembled a gigantic grave, the two conducting their manoeuvres among the grass and stinging nettles, while soldiers armed with muskets peered out from Fort Pitt's loopholes.

*   *   *

It was another afternoon, and a fine one, when the boy and his father took to the countryside around Cobham. They passed quaint cottages and bluebell copses, and strolled down roads white with chalk dust which, by a chance arrangement of grit, could bring to mind a finger of a goblin, if not a hobgoblin, and then they passed hop gardens with their standing poles, then went on through the churchyard to emerge near the Leather Bottle, the old half-timbered inn, where a middle-aged man with a curly white beard stood drinking upon the step. Beyond the bearded man, through the inn's open door, could be seen leather armchairs as well as prints upon the walls. A pretty young girl with ribbons passed by, and the bearded man gave an appreciative glance.

Onwards the boy and his father proceeded, through the village, beside the porches of old ivy-covered almshouses, and then further on still, past works of much greater antiquity, mysterious standing stones.

There was a fence they peered through, marking the boundary of Cobham Hall, the ancestral home of the Earls of Darnley, and here they spied grazing deer, giants of ash trees, dashing hares among rhododendrons, winding paths and smooth lawns, as well as fine elms and huge-circumference oaks.

‘May we go in?' the boy asked.

His father laughed. ‘As soon as we receive an invitation from the Earl of Darnley!'

*   *   *

Now it was a cold day, and Christmas approached. The boy visited his grandmother in Oxford Street. She was a fine, stately old lady, bespectacled and tending towards severity, and an upholder of the values of neatness and order. The cosiness of the fireside, and her grandson sitting opposite, made stories rise from her memory and she told them to the boy – local tales she had heard when she was a housekeeper in Cheshire: the road haunted by a ghostly dog; the brimstone cave where the Devil was raised; the field where a dragon was slain; the bridge where a hooded monk walked, intoning old-fashioned English; the exact spot where the last jester in England had died, where his bells could still be heard if the wind was right. Then she told of the lives of servants and masters in the house where she worked, and how the estate was tidy, and controlled, and its affairs ran smoothly, thanks to the devoted efforts of herself and those downstairs.

And now it
was
Christmas! The very word ‘Christmas' sounded to him like a boot stepping into snow. From the way his father said, ‘I think it
may
snow again this year,' the boy gathered that snow was not regular, or even usual, and yet there had been snow at Christmas for more years of his young life than not – white was the Christmas colour, not green or brown. A Christmas without snow was Christmas in name only.

But regardless of whether there was snow, his father was never half-hearted about the festival. There he was in the kitchen, preparing the punch. He crumbled half a sugarloaf into hot Lisbon wine, stirred, added cloves and cinnamon, and poured the mixture over bitter oranges – he passed a segment of orange to his son before doing so. The orange was
so
bitter the boy screwed up his face, and his father laughed and rubbed his son's head. There was tasting to see whether a little more of this or a little more of that should be added. Then the mixture sat in an earthenware pitcher and was left to mull in the coals of the fire. Afterwards they played games, his father bringing out the playing cards, or putting on the blindfold for blindman's buff. There was no room to dance, but dance they did, his father humming the tunes he remembered from the Christmases of his own boyhood, and mistletoe was brought in, and drawn from behind his back to kiss his wife. There was laughter and they ran to the window – for outside, the snow
was
brought in, by northern winds, and Christmas was truly here!

*   *   *

Then in January, in the warm parlour, the boy sat looking through an album of coloured engravings, and found one showing the King of the Beggars. Other beggars relied on rags and human sympathy, but this beggar was different – his ploy was disguise. There he was as a madman, poor Tom of Bedlam, cutting the air with a handful of straw as though he were a knight; fellows took pity on him, and wondered whether he had sufficient wit to know what a coin was; for he bit a penny as though it were a morsel, and muttered, ‘This bread is hard.' But if they tried to take it back, it was his. Then he was a poor clergyman; a tin miner in Cornwall; a seaman whose ship had been dashed against rocks; a rat-catcher whose livelihood had been destroyed by an abundance of cats; and even a poor aged grandmother, not begging for herself, you understand, but for her poor grandchildren, whose parents had been burnt alive in a barn, and she was their only hope.

*   *   *

Now the boy was with his young nurse in the attic. She had an unhealthy yellowish skin, especially for her age – his father said she must have a liver complaint – while her pupils remained excessively large, even on bright days. She was also thin, and wore green dresses, and his mother said she seemed more drooping daffodil than English rose. Then there was her beak. Some noses suggest birds, as did this nurse's, but hers also brought to mind swoops upon defenceless field mice.

On a winter's evening she took the boy to the nursery in the attic, where she lit a candle which she sat beside, and as it flickered in a draught from the window it threw her features into disturbing contrast. Then she hunched her shoulders, looked suspiciously from side to side, and she growled, turning herself into a woman-wolf who clawed at the air and let her lower lip droop to show her teeth, and she howled and snarled. She would dash her claws forward suddenly for no reason, to scare the boy.

She also had a relish for purchasing pamphlets on the streets, especially about the trials and confessions of murderers. Most bore a lurid woodcut on the wrapper, often a man with his head in a noose, and this man must have committed many, many crimes, and escaped the gallows on every occasion, for exactly the same picture would appear from one pamphlet to the next.

‘“On Saturday night last,”' she said, reading to the boy from the pamphlet, ‘“the wife of a journeyman tailor went into a pork butcher in D—L—.” Now I wonder where D—L— is? Well, we won't think about that now. “A man came in carrying a sack, and she thought from his appearance he looked suspicious. She told a friend, and news soon reached the authorities – and when the shop was searched, two dead bodies were found wrapped in a sack.” Would you believe it? I wonder what the butcher's pies tasted like, eh? Ha ha ha. I suppose if they were seasoned well, you might not know the difference!' Then she stared straight at the boy, and said: ‘But this is not the first time such a thing has happened.'

She told the tale of a man turning his wife into meat pies. She described the seasoning of a bowlful of pink flesh with pepper and herbs, and how he sucked a small bone taken from the foot, and in mime she sucked the bone too, holding her fingers to her mouth, and made the sound of a pop as she pulled the sweet little bone free of her lips – and explained that the man added it to a large pile of clean bones to be buried in the garden. She looked the boy straight in the eyes with her large dark pupils, as she told this tale. He cowered back on the bed, into the room's corner.

Then she told of travellers staying at a certain inn, and the stouter ones would be sent to a special room. ‘Perhaps you can guess why, ha ha ha,' she said. She recounted that one fat traveller took off his shoes in that room, and then he noticed that a rug was discoloured and damp at a corner and so he called for the innkeeper, who said that a clumsy maid had spilt a jug of water earlier in the day. ‘I am thinking of dismissing her,' said the innkeeper. ‘I know I should, but I am too kind.' ‘I was concerned lest the roof had a leak,' said the fat traveller. ‘It does not,' said the innkeeper, and with a smile and a little bow he left the room. She told of how the fat traveller soon fell asleep, and he slept soundly. But the innkeeper came back in the middle of the night. He pulled out a long, sharp blade. It shone in a moonbeam. Then, ever so gently, the innkeeper placed his hand over the fat man's mouth. The traveller did not at first wake up. But he did when the innkeeper gave him the tiniest shake. And as the fat traveller's eyes opened, the last thing he saw was the blade, and the grin of the innkeeper, just before the sharp edge was drawn across the throat.