Death and Mr. Pickwick (55 page)

Maria!

Her eyes did not merely sparkle, they were moistened stars. They were eyes inside his head more often than outside. She was a villain too! Only a villain could have such a wicked laugh! And those dimples!

No one dressed better than Maria. She teased and she persuaded by colour and lace and cotton. Reds and cherry-blossom pinks suited her best, and ribbon trimming was her delight. She knew how to angle her body to just the correct degree, whether standing in a doorway, or bending forward, or inclining her head. The wrist that emerged from her cuff led to the most slender, most shapely hand that an artist could ever paint as a princess's. When her fingers moved, their elegance was a framing of the air itself. And the voice! No sound more musical, no tones happier, no human lilting more bird-like. And every real bird's song on a fine day was a manifestation of
her
. She was the sun, the trees, the fields, she was all that was wonderful on a day in England. What beautiful curls! He was her slave from the first moment of seeing. All relish for food gone, save her. All his future was
her.
Dwelling, career, possessions, life – all would be devoted to the pleasing of the one, the only. He imagined the furniture in their house, the cutlery, the books on their shelves. He would become someone, do something great and grand, just to win Maria.

Were he to become an actor, he decided, Maria would be his.

Now the speeches of Charles Mathews were always on his lips. Whether shut up in his room, or out walking in the fields, he repeated the staccato lines of Cosmogony on the Nile:

‘Thousand miles long – swam down it many a time – ate part of a crocodile there that wanted to eat me – saw him cry with vexation as I killed him – tears big as marrowfat peas – bottled one of them for the curiosity of the thing. True tale – pos – I'm not joking!'

Yet this approach might perhaps not provide a complete and convincing proof of his suitability to Maria's parents. Her father held a senior position in the bank of Smith, Payne and Smiths, and although it was true the bank was known for convenience as Smith Payne's, this was about as close as her father moved to the staccato style. Mr Beadnell, her father, like the bank itself, was founded upon practical common sense and financial security. His eyes had bulging pursefuls of skin below, and monumental eyebrows above, befitting a man of status, capital and salary. His side whiskers alone were soundness, his square face probity, and his nose was scepticism itself towards anyone lacking an account of several hundred pounds sterling.

Still, her family did hold musical evenings. He studied her hands upon the harp. He asked her permission to try. ‘No,' she said, ‘you do not exactly
pluck
the string.' She moved her hand over his. Very gently she
rolled
the string over the finger. She said: ‘You do not use the little finger. Much too weak. Well, a gentleman might perhaps, if his hands were very strong, and if he did not follow the advice of his tutor.'

He studied her raspberry dress – it had a collar of black points, each suggestive of a plectrum for an Italian mandolin.

‘I
should
think of King David and the psalms when I play,' she said, ‘but I am wicked and do not. No, no,
too
much force.' She tapped the back of his hand and took control of the harp again. ‘People said I did not have the persistence to learn the harp. I have shown them to be wrong, haven't I? And if I press my ear against it, the sound goes all the way through from the wood, and that makes me shiver. But a nice shiver. I would play my harp all day if I could.'

He caught a view of her father and mother in the doorway, holding wine glasses and eyeing this musical lesson with suspicion. If anything, the mother was the more suspicious of the pair – a small woman, with a stern face like a half-wrung dishcloth.

But he now had the entire performance of Charles Mathews by heart. He recited a section for her as they drank wine. She laughed, with utterly bewitching gaiety, until her eyes lit up anew as another guest, a young man in military uniform, approached her from the side and took her away to meet his friends. The misery on the deserted suitor's face was inexpressible.

Later, behind a door, among wine glasses with dregs which had been abandoned on a shelf and forgotten about, he spoke to her. He would be more than he was. He would burst out from current circumstances. She should not dismiss him. She was his determination to do better. She was his passion. She could turn him away, but still he would work for her, still he would strive to make her realise the truth about himself.

‘Oh now you have made me knock a wine glass over,' she said. ‘It is on the carpet. I must fetch someone to clean it up.'

*   *   *

Sometimes after visiting Maria he would attempt to cheer himself with a trip to the nearby George and Vulture Tavern of George Yard. In the heart of the alleys straddling the parishes of St Michael's of Cornhill and St Edmund the King, the George and Vulture was rarely found except by those who knew of its existence already. Its exterior brick walls were dull – but inside its food was not. Steaks, pies, chops, sprats and shrimps were consumed with glee at hard, high, pew-like benches, among pine panels, and upon pure white tablecloths.

The customers of the George and Vulture constituted a varied collection – philosophers, instrument makers, chessplayers and Freemasons, as well as old rakes who practised do-what-thou-wilt – all left their hats on the long line of coat pegs. A newcomer, if he were an observant sort with an eye for the curious, might in the first instance notice the two parish boundary markers fixed inside upon the wall; and then, if he were an inquisitive sort, he might also ask the waiter about the origin of the establishment's peculiar name.

‘Well, sir,' the centre-parted waiter would say, brushing crumbs and tidying glasses, ‘now
there
is a story.'

 

*

IN THE 1660S, IN THE
alley where the modern tavern now stands, there was a wine merchant, whose name it was unimportant to know – for everyone knew him by his shop sign, a vulture, and this sign was alive. Tethered by the claw to a pole and feeding board, about five feet off the ground, sat the bald-headed bird, acquired from a Spaniard who had nothing more to trade for a bottle of sack.

The merchant, who was also bald-headed, and thin, gave every indication of loving this bird. He would stroke its neck, and never tired of watching it feed. The bird would live upon dead rats and mice, which the merchant picked up whenever he saw an example in the gutter. He also bought fresh meat for the bird, especially raw ox liver, which the vulture loved – and the merchant equally loved to watch as the bird gorged an entire four pounds of offal in less time than it took a man to count to thirty. Even after such a meal, the vulture would not refuse food and would take a dead mouse, though parts would remain undigested for a while within its beak.

The vulture disgusted some customers, and frightened others with its rattling screech, but the wine merchant proclaimed that the bird attracted more customers, by virtue of being a curiosity, than it lost. Once, when the merchant articulated this view to a supplier of burgundy, the unfeathered part of the bird's head flushed, as if in agreement, and the merchant hugged his own hands in glee. So the situation continued – until 1666.

The bird did not die in the Great Fire of London, for the man took it everywhere, tethered to a handcart. When the flames devoured the alley, the bird was safe, and from a distance, with its master, it watched the city ablaze.

Further down the alley was an old inn, or rather there
had
been such an inn, until the fire. This was the George, which had served Londoners since the twelfth century. Chaucer was said to have drunk there; Dick Whittington too. The owners vowed to rebuild the George – they raised the finance, and before long, a tall thin building, a new George, rose in the same spot.

But the wine merchant could not find the means to rebuild
his
premises. He scavenged for trade as best as he could, selling wine from his handcart, always with the vulture at his side, going here and there, and doing a good trade at Paternoster Row, where the burnt-out booksellers made their new home. However, his takings were not what they had been, and when the George was rebuilt he approached the landlord and said that he would like to rent a part of it to use for his wine business, and for this would share his profit.

This proposal was not unwelcome to the George's landlord, except for one matter: the vulture. Its eating habits turned his stomach. Above all, he hated the way the bird fixed him in its eye. The mess it made on the street was yet another concern. He could not allow the merchant to keep the bird.

The merchant pleaded that he was known as the Vulture Man, that he would be nothing without his bird, he would lose trade. ‘This bird is my partner,' he declared.

‘You can't keep it,' said the landlord.

‘This bird is my only friend.'

‘You have no friends
because
of that bird.'

There seemed no possibility of a solution until the landlord said: ‘I will compromise. I will change the name of my inn to the George and Vulture. I shall be accommodating and even paint a vulture on the sign, provided it's not too detailed about its eating habits. But take the bird? Never.'

The wine merchant looked at the vulture, and he said, in the weakest voice he had ever used, ‘So be it.'

The merchant walked away with the bird on the handcart. He settled down at a green. He fed the vulture a piece of ox liver, watching it take it down. He stroked the bird's neck. Then he put a small hessian sack over its head, kissed it through the sack, and with one smart movement, he broke the vulture's neck. He took the carcass to the Thames, threw it in, and watched it sink.

Although the wine merchant continued to sell wine, he was never the same man. He died shortly afterwards. But the George retained the addition ‘and Vulture' for ever.

That is the story. Some doubt its truth. Especially as the George and Vulture was mentioned before the Great Fire of London in a fifteenth-century poem by John Skelton.

 

*

THE ADMIRER OF MARIA HAD
become a newspaper reporter. For, when employed at Ellis and Blackmore, Mr Ellis had one day said to him, after two nostrils of tobacco: ‘Do you seek advancement in the law?' Before any reply could be given, Mr Ellis said: ‘If so, you must think like a lawyer. Whatever your feelings or opinions, they are of no use. The very best lawyers were born the way they are and are without any capacity for change.'

He looked at Mr Ellis as an example. Distrust, caution and suspicion hung upon the lawyer's shoulders, his only unqualified enthusiasm residing in the sparkles in his eyes created by the brown powder. A person could say to Mr Ellis that eggs come from hens – and he would comment: ‘Yes, that
may
be so.'

So the admirer of Maria came to realise he was not a lawyer.

*   *   *

At the dismal rear of the Strangers' Gallery in the House of Commons, parliamentary reporters entered through a small door to take up a seat constructed from the very hardest wood, within a cramped row where there was scarcely enough air to breathe. He squeezed himself, as the
Morning Chronicle
's representative, between two other reporters. There were half a dozen rows of strangers in front of him. He balanced a notebook on his knee, and his shorthand pencil began to render the prime minister's speech. The words were hard to hear, and so, like every other reporter, he would have to fill them as best as he could – the perfectly factual account did not exist. The pressure of leaning on his knee made his entire frame ache, and it was a relief when order broke down in a stream of interruptions, for then he could stretch himself.

Whenever there was an election or a political crisis, it meant miles and miles upon wheels over all England, in all weathers, through slush, through mud, hearing this Whig, hearing that Tory. In winter, he rose and dressed in darkness to catch a coach soon after dawn, the driver only half awake and reeking from a sleepload of gin. On a winter night in a coach, when all the straw and blankets and footwarmers could not defend against the cold, the heat from the flesh of the other passengers was welcome, regardless of the stink, and a stop at an inn to change horses always resulted in a dash for hot brandy. Once, on such a night, an outside passenger, a thin man, was so numb with cold that he moaned ‘Help me!' for he could not move his limbs, and had to be lifted down by the guard and a stable boy. ‘You're lucky,' he heard the guard say. ‘Couple of years ago, a man froze to death, and nobody noticed until Charing Cross. And that was only when the driver approached him for a gratuity.'

But there was also the comparative pleasure of coaches in the summer, when the fragrance of roadside honeysuckle wafted inside, helping to counter the sweat of other passengers, and on one occasion several buckets of fish.

Then, as the season changed again, he had been forced to sit outside when all insides were taken, in unceasing rain, from six o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock at night, when his umbrella was so soaked and ineffectual that after an hour it might as well have been a dripping cobweb.

There were the journeys too when a wind blowing through a valley helped the coach along, and the speed downhill put him in fear of his life.
And
the journeys when he came to the verge of sleep, and some pleasant reflection was just preceding slumber, when the road jerked him awake; although at such moments he had been astonished by the Morphean powers of certain passengers, who could snore through a road made of boulders and chasms – head lolling, mouth open – and yet would awake of their own accord at their precise destination, as if a watchman had been commissioned to give a personal tap on the shoulder.