Death and Mr. Pickwick (52 page)

The boy hunched up his shoulders in fear, covered his mouth, and drew in his breath.

She further explained that when the deed was done, the innkeeper pulled back the rug to reveal the ring handle of a trap door. Its wood was splintered and rotting, and steam rose through a crack. The innkeeper lifted the door, and the surface of a bubbling cauldron was revealed by the innkeeper's candlelight. With effort, he dragged the man across the floor, and then pushed him over. The nurse looked straight at the boy again and said: ‘The splash was so great that a speck of boiling water hit the innkeeper's hand. It left a scar like
this
.' She lifted her hand so as to show a white mark where she had scalded herself on the iron.

Yet, for all the grisliness of the tales she told, if the boy was ever miserable, there could be no one kinder than this nurse; if he cried, she clutched him to her breast and sang soothing songs. There could be no better protector.

And sometimes she simply played with him. He loved it when, on a December evening, the magic lantern was brought into the room. It looked like a japanned kettle. She pinned a calico sheet on the facing wall, and a clear and brilliant light burst from the lantern. The smell of sperm oil from the lantern's lamp, with its pleasant bacony odour, filled the room. After she had carefully dusted a painted glass slide, the boy inserted it into the lantern, and he moved the tube at the lantern's front in and out to sharpen the picture. Into focus came his favourite slide: a clown in all his colours, holding a hoop for a dog to jump through; and in the succeeding picture, the dog had completed the jump.

The nurse was called Mary Weller. ‘I have never met anyone called Weller before,' he said to her once.

‘It's not an unusual name in these parts,' she replied. ‘There's Thomas Weller, keeps the Granby Head. Or just go to the tombstones in St Mary's – you'll see a Weller near the entrance, sleeping peacefully.' This he did, the next time the family attended the Sunday service.

June 1822

Gone was Chatham. Gone was Mary Weller. The miserable boy looked out of a small attic window in Bayham Street, Camden, London, on to a pokey garden in which every flower was a weed, and the fields beyond a wasteland. Others, looking from outside, might see Bayham Street as pleasant enough, with neat houses and gardens and fields nearby in which kites were flown and cricket played. The boy saw everywhere a dinginess, the houses cramped to half the size. The family was in decline.

*   *   *

The boy heard the man calling to see his father, one evening. The boy listened outside the door. ‘How long,' said the man, ‘would you require to pay me back?'

*   *   *

One morning, the boy went heavy-hearted to a bookseller in the Hampstead Road, for his mother had asked him to raise money, and in a painful way. His beloved volumes of Smollett were sold; soon afterwards went Fielding and
The Arabian Nights
. Gradually every book he loved was placed in the hands of this bookseller. Often, when the boy arrived, the bookseller was lying on a turn-up bedstead towards the rear of the shop, and his face upon the greasy pillow bore marks of a fight or an accident – a black eye one week, a scab on the brow the next – and these marks were probably connected to the smell of hard liquor which wafted across to the boy as the bookseller came to the counter and inspected the spines and held each book above him, to see that no pages were loose. The bookseller looked at the boy in an affable way, which especially made the boy's skin creep, as though the bookseller hoped he would become a regular. ‘They are cheap editions. There are many of those,' said the bookseller. He told him the amount and the books were gone.

*   *   *

It was a day towards the end of February 1824, and soon after dawn, when the officers knocked. One linked his arm in the arm of the boy's father, and they took him away.

*   *   *

There were dirtier places of imprisonment for debtors than the Marshalsea, but few so constricting, as though the building itself were a lesson in prudency and moral restraint. Fifty-six small rooms, each for a man and his family, crammed into a rectangular building, and reached by external staircases, narrow and wooden, which creaked with every step, and all surrounded by a paved yard, bearing chalk remnants of hopscotch games, bounded beyond by spiked walls.

Yet for some of the inmates, the Marshalsea was a raucous tavern with much beer and tobacco consumed amid roars of laughter. To the boy, it virtually suggested that some inmates
enjoyed
debtors' prison and would
choose
to stay there, if they could.

Except that in many corners there huddled downcast and friendless men who could not procure beer and tobacco. His father did not belong to this forlorn group. Nor to the devil-may-care puffers and swillers. His father certainly laughed in prison, however. He drank tea in pretty crockery before the fireplace, and he walked to the window to check on the progress in a skittles game, and one might think that, apart from shabbiness, he was more content and more comfortable inside than outside. And the boy wanted to say: do not accept this fate, do not laugh, do not be
happy
with this condition.

His father stayed for just over three months, until he came to an arrangement with his creditors under the Insolvent Debtors Act.

*   *   *

‘The writ of
fieri facias
will take your goods,' said the red-nosed middle-aged clerk at the desk in the corner as he looked the office junior in the eye. ‘But the writ of
capias
will take
you
.' And he laughed with relish.

Three years had passed since the Marshalsea. The boy, now fifteen, had found work in the legal profession at the chambers of Ellis and Blackmore – three old rooms, with one looking out into the court, another room at the back, and the clerks' office, which was separated by glass partitions from the rest.

The clerk's breath smelt of the previous night, and cups of coffee had made numerous permanent stains on the cover of Tidd's
Practice
upon his desk. His occupation was copying. But this man took it upon himself to explain one or two legal expressions, apparently because he enjoyed doing so, rather than for the understanding it would impart, or out of necessity for implementing the procedures of the office.

‘If an affidavit of debt is filed, by a
ca. sa
. writ, then you could have the debtor even before a judgement is obtained – and if he don't put up a fight, why then – the sheriff could arrest him, and he'd be quodded like
that
!' He snapped his fingers with an animated flourish in front of the boy, and nodded his head two or three times, as if to say: ‘Here is a lesson in life, lad, and no mistake.'

Then there were the other clerks. There was the smartly dressed articled clerk, who rarely went a week without an invitation to a party – a full-head-of-hair ambitious young man, whose future would surely see him don the horsehair wig of the court junior, and eventually the goat-hair wigs of the serjeant and the judge. Then the oldest clerk, in his fifties but looking older, whose skin was so wrinkled it scarcely seemed a continuous surface, who confessed to the boy that once he had been ambitious and hoped for the position of a copyist in Chancery, where one could be paid by the page, with therefore a premium on large handwriting and good clean margins. ‘But life is long, and takes other courses,' he said, ‘and one must be happy with how far one has travelled.'

The two founders of the firm, the boy discovered soon after starting, were distinguished by the vast quantities of snuff it was their habit to consume. Mr Blackmore was the more fastidious and – compared to his partner – the more abstemious. He would take a pinch of snuff in the middle of an explanation and, like an undernourished pig rooting in the undergrowth, the nose was applied to the back of his hand, so as not to miss a particle. Mr Ellis, however, possessed the confidence and gravitas of a man with ten years' more experience of nasal tobacco. Snuff had worked into Mr Ellis's entire system, and his lawn handkerchief was, by the end of every working day, mahogany-spotted on both sides, in every square half-inch. His dark complexion seemed the very product of the powder, and his whole face, from the frequent inhalation, had pulled his features tight. Whenever he applied his nose, there was the snuff-shine in Mr Ellis's eyes! All energy and pleasure the snuff imparted emerged in winks and twinkles, and peers here, peers there. The boy speculated that Mr Ellis entered the legal profession precisely for the great opportunities it afforded for the punctuation of business by snuff.

Before long the boy was set to work copying phrases such as ‘I give, devise and bequeath'. He worked well: it was
as if
he enjoyed himself. One of his duties was to keep up to date the petty cash book – and one morning he picked up a slip whose details were to be copied into this book, and he saw a name which made his quill pause. The name was ‘Weller'.

‘Is something wrong?' It was another junior, a handsome fellow called Tom Potter who had started the same week. The two had formed a bond when they had both shown a talent for imitating clients and those around the office. One of their first imitations was of a stale-smelling laundress, who often was still sweeping the office when the clerks arrived in the morning. ‘Gi' me five more minutes, jus' five,' she would say. The junior formerly from Chatham not only imitated the laundress to perfection, he employed the phrase whenever Mr Blackmore attempted to hurry the copying of those statements which received a two-guineas bonus for expedition. ‘Gi' me five more minutes, jus' five,' he said, under his breath. Tom grinned from the stool opposite, and responded by imitating a phrase that Mr Blackmore often used, ‘Where is the praecipe book? I need the praecipe book!' finishing with an imaginary intake of invisible snuff by moving his nose along the cover of that very item.

‘No, nothing wrong,' the junior formerly from Chatham said to Potter.

As time passed, an interest in imitation led to a passion for the theatre, and they attended plays on as many nights as they were able. In the better theatres, Potter would know who was who in the boxes, Lady Somebody or Sir Somebody Else, who would add lustre to the performance by virtue of being there. On stage there would be shows of feeling and professions of love, when suitors fell on their knees and a cambric handkerchief was flourished to wipe a tear; there would be deep sighs, and gazes that fixed upon a face for ages as though suffering paralysis, and then suddenly the performer shifted as fast as a whip, and turned his back on the beloved.

If a performance at Covent Garden had worked up an appetite, they went to the basement of the house adjoining the Adelphi Theatre, the cave of harmony that was the Cider Cellar of Maiden Lane. One night, they had just seen Robert Keeley in the role of Billy Black, a brass-faced boot-cleaner in a red waistcoat and short corduroy trousers, who always had a conundrum and a grin for his clients. ‘Why am I like a farthing rushlight at three o'clock in the morning?' Billy said to a customer as he returned the shining footwear, before exiting the stage. ‘Do you give up? Because I am going out!' Repeating such lines, the two legal clerks descended into the cellar via the broad flight of stairs, and the smell of spilt cider rose as they descended, mixed up with other odours – the half-mustard half-urine smell of devilled kidneys, as well as toasted cheese and abundant cigar smoke. There was nowhere else in London that smelt the same, and the noise of the cellar rose to accompany its smell: cracked singing, and applause for the singer's disreputable song.

They took themselves to a shady corner next to a wall, though in truth everywhere was shady, and the main source of illumination was burning tobacco, as though the Cider Cellar were a place to
be
, but not a place to be
seen
. They sat beside stacked rows of empty cider casks, highly suggestive of a ship's powder magazine, except that no sea captain would allow so many lit pipes in such proximity to gunpowder. Another cask served as their table. A man played a piano on the far side of the room, and the two tapped along as they drank. Potter now made observations of the customers, as he had done in the theatre. There was a man on an opposite wall who was applying a gold toothpick while sitting among a group of associates, who, on any phrenological assessment, could have formed a criminal gang. ‘He's a sharp cove,' said Potter of the man with the toothpick. ‘I wouldn't trust him. He's a weller if ever I saw one.'

‘A what?'

‘You've never heard that before? A
weller
,' he said, ‘is a criminal who short-changes his accomplices.' He cast a glance towards the villainous table to check he was not overheard. ‘The idea is that the hole in his pocket is as deep as a well. Is something wrong?'

‘No, nothing.'

Suddenly a song started up, led by a cheery, beery fellow in a costermonger's silken neckerchief:

I love, oh, how I love to ride,

My hot, my wheedling, coaxing bride,

While every throb, and every heave

Does near of senses her bereave,

And she takes the staff of life in hand,

Till she makes each pulse and fibre stand!

I love her cun-ny! I love her cun-ny!

And on it I will ever be.

The two young men from Ellis and Blackmore laughed and thumped on their cask in rhythm to the song.

In spite of every randy whore

I'll kiss my luscious bride the more!

When the applause for the song was over, Potter said: ‘I have been thinking back to when we saw
The Witch of Endor
.'

The witch had waved a talisman of coloured glass and wood and, with quantities of wailing, she raised the ghost of a prophet, who entered with a somewhat heavy footstep for a gliding apparition.