Death and Mr. Pickwick (70 page)

‘Have you heard the rumours of who'll be in the coach next year?' said Lacey.

‘No – who?'

‘Thomas Kelly. He is going to give up the numbers trade.'

‘Never!'

‘Apparently so. He's desperate to be Lord Mayor.'

‘I presume he sees it as respectability.'

Seymour's children had strayed further away, and once they were out of earshot, Lacey said: ‘I heard an even more peculiar thing about Kelly a little while ago, and it connects to a work you illustrated for me. You remember we did the murder in the red barn?'

‘Impossible to forget.'

‘You remember that Kelly did it too?'

‘I do.'

‘I heard that his murder in the red barn had received a dubious honour. After the murderer was dissected, the numbers of Kelly's edition were bound together in the murderer's skin.'

An extraordinarily specialised look came over Seymour's face, which led Lacey to say: ‘I think I have shocked you, Mr Seymour. I do apologise.'

‘No, I have been feeling a little unwell today. What a strange immortality that grants the work.'

‘You sound … almost envious.'

‘In a way, I am. It should have been the Knight and Lacey edition that was bound.'

‘With your pictures.'

‘With my pictures. But – as I said, I am feeling a little unwell, Mr Lacey. It is probably just a cold. Or the sprats. Or perhaps I caught something from someone I met recently. I thought he was a malingerer, but perhaps not. I think I must go home.' He summoned his children and bade his former publisher farewell.

*   *   *

In the event, Seymour was confined to bed for three weeks, amid fever and muscular pains. One day, when Jane came to the bedside, he said: ‘I have been lying here, thinking about à Beckett criticising my spelling.'

‘Why concern yourself, Robert? À Beckett has gone.'

‘I know I cannot spell. Sometimes I just put down what I think. Sometimes I feel confident I can spell a word and minutes later I cannot. My brain is just weak for some reason around spelling.'

‘Do not call it weakness. Who has your strength with puns?' She sat on the eiderdown and stroked his head. ‘You always have me to check the words in your caricatures.'

‘The truth is, I have been thinking about the letterpress for my Mr Pickwick drawings. As long as I can describe what is required, I don't think I need to write it myself.'

‘As you wish. But I would check it for spelling for you.'

‘It would be page after page of corrections, every one an embarrassment to me. Besides, this illness has left me behind with my other work. I think it's better if I find someone to write up to my drawings.'

‘Perhaps Henry Mayhew?'

‘He has crossed my mind. But he is rather a dabbler. My concern is whether he has the power to complete a work on a larger scale without becoming distracted. Besides, he has various schemes of his own which occupy him, not all of which are sensible.'

‘Mr McLean may know someone.'

‘Too concerned with pictures. I raised it the last time I was at the Haymarket, but I can tell he is not interested. I mentioned it to Spooner some months ago, and it appealed to him. But I am not on the best of terms with Spooner now. He is too friendly with Hervey, and will not push him. There are other writers that occur to me. Hook. Poole. Moncrieff. Hunt. One of them perhaps. Oh, someone will come along. Someone fast – unlike Hervey.'

‘Someone who can keep up with you.'

*   *   *

‘You'll take a rum again, Charles?'

The landlord at the Grotto public house in Holborn, not far from Furnival's Inn, poured and handed over the drink to the writer who was among the most dependable of his customers.

Charles Whitehead leant against the bar with a confident air. Yet, just two glasses ago, when he entered the Grotto, he had the nervous timidity of a parish schoolteacher, and he looked the part, too – dressed all in black, with threadbare elbows and a scholarly stoop. Now he had the easy manner of a gentleman, with a sparkling blue gaze and a pure white smile which he showed often. He had grown younger as well. When the first sip touched his lips, he had looked careworn and in the middle of his forties; but soon he was in his early thirties, which was actually his age. Like himself, the other men at the bar worked in artistic endeavours, for the most part – painters, actors and writers. He felt comfortable in such company, and he exchanged words on various subjects, his gestures becoming larger as the rum took hold, when his worn-out elbows would be on display – but he did not care, for Charles Whitehead was held in high regard in the Grotto. He was ‘Whitehead, the brilliant Whitehead', the greatest talker in the house, the coiner of the best bon mots. It was still remembered that, after a sixth rum, he had once remarked: ‘You are a man of common sense, sir – by which I mean, the
scents
which all men produce, in private.' And after a seventh, when challenged on a point of Latin, he said: ‘You are a dog, sir, and in an establishment called the Grotto, I say –
cave canem
.'

When a new fellow came to the Grotto, in the company of a regular, he would always be introduced to Charles Whitehead. Though the newcomer, like the regular, learnt so little of Whitehead himself, beyond wordplay, that they might just as well have read the bon mots as an anonymous contribution to a magazine.

*   *   *

When Charles Whitehead was barely three years of age, his father took him to the wharf on a summer's afternoon, to watch the barrels, as they were unloaded from a barge, that were intended for the Whitehead family wine shop. The boy was swept up by a swarthy, laughing, stubbly man, with fine teeth and a peculiar accent. The man sat him on a barrel, metal cups were filled with red wine, and Charles Whitehead's father and the swarthy man drank a toast to each other in the afternoon sun.

‘Drink when you are happy, not when you are sad, though drink then too if you must!' said the father.

‘What theenks your leetle boy?' said the swarthy man. He held the cup to Charles Whitehead's lips. If it was expected the boy would spit and splutter and pull a face, that did not occur; instead, the boy grabbed the cup with both hands, and drank hard – the vessel had to be prised from his fingers.

There was laughter and when the cups were refilled Whitehead Senior said: ‘The better the wine, the clearer your head the next day.'

By the time he was ten, Charles Whitehead had grown tall, but also spindly, with a sickly pallor to his cheek. He often stood by the Thames in summer, just gazing, in the early evening, because he loved the water under the red sky. He was distressed when a boisterous lad several years older than himself, whom he knew to be a bill-discounter's boy, threw stones at a gull on a post.

‘Please don't do that to the poor bird,' said Charles Whitehead. ‘Look at the sky instead. Look at the Thames. Aren't they both lovely?'

‘Been in your father's cellar?' The boy laughed and ran off, but not before he tossed a stone at Charles Whitehead, which hit the chest; it was not hurled with force, but even so, Charles Whitehead began to cry.

At fourteen, Charles Whitehead worked in his father's wine shop in St Mary Axe, between Leadenhall Street and Houndsditch, among shipping agents, counting houses and bill-discounting firms, and all of these, employers and employees alike, gave the Whitehead shop their custom.

Charles had little enthusiasm for the affairs of the shop, and most of the customers struck him as being exceedingly dull. Furthermore, he so lacked self-confidence that the mere presence of a new customer in the shop could send him scuttling to the cellar.

If there was no one to serve, he read voraciously, sipping wine as he did so, occasionally with the accompaniment of a forkful of pickled cucumber. He especially enjoyed the words of Richard Steele. Whitehead Senior did attempt to teach his son the mysteries of the trade, but the lack of interest on the young face proved that action was required if the Whitehead wine shop were to continue beyond the current generation. Accordingly, Mr Whitehead packed his son off to Oporto, to take part in the grape harvest at the beginning of October, in the hope it would be the making of the boy.

Charles Whitehead learnt instead the aches and pains of fifty miles on the back of a mule to the wine country. True, there were pleasant moments beside the River Douro, under the vine-covered hills; but he missed the Thames. And the descent in a boat loaded with barrels was terror. Although the boatmen avoided every rock with great ability, Whitehead feared the crack of the hull at any moment. When the boat negotiated a small waterfall, he grabbed the rim of a barrel as though it would save his life.

The result was that Whitehead returned to England with a tanned face, but he was still long and thin and lacking in self-confidence, with a grave and scholarly air, and even a stooping walk, young though he was.

One day, the father asked the son to do stocktaking and the boy got to his feet, ready to do the task, but the father said: ‘Why do I always need to tell you? Why do you not just
do
it, Charles?'

‘If you set up a diary for me, Father, I would do it, of course.'

‘That is not what I want to hear!' The father put his hand up to his forehead. When he brought it down, he fixed his son in a hard, uncompromising gaze.

‘You find what I do dull. There is nothing that interests you about it. That is the simple truth, isn't it?'

‘I am sorry that is so.'

‘Dull.
Dull
. You will discover true dull, my boy. Dull with no prospects for your future at the end of it.'

Before the week was out, the father had secured employment for his son in a commercial house, as well as lodgings nearby.

So Charles Whitehead became one of a group of five clerks in a cramped and stuffy office. His working day consisted of names, numbers and columns, as well as the writing of commercial letters, provided they were of an elementary standard. On the third day, the heavy-browed manager stood behind him, looking over the new clerk's shoulder, and said: ‘You have very neat handwriting, Whitehead.' He picked up the sheet. ‘Look at this, the rest of you. Every comma beautifully placed. I have never seen such precision in the way a clerk forms his words.'

Whitehead looked down in a state of complete embarrassment.

In the break for lunch, he usually consumed a sandwich and an essay by Steele – once, at his desk, he read of how the author invited friends to share a hamper of wine, reviving the spirits of everyone. There was a beautiful virgin whom Steele mentioned, the first to encourage his love, dressed in a gown for a ball, but a week later she was in her shroud – and the wine could chase away even
that
melancholy.

Then the senior clerk came round with a bottle of Tyzack's Imperial Jet Black Ink, refilling each inkwell. The lip of the bottle tapped twice on the inkwell's rim, signifying that lunch was at an end, and Whitehead closed his book with sad resignation. He scraped the back of a quill, slit the nib, and dipped it in that very ink.

His solace in the evening was the public house. He developed two faces. The mournful, scholarly face when there was no liquor within; and the sociable, friendly, loud, passionate, confident face when there was. Whilst this could be expected of any man, it was never so marked as with Charles Whitehead. Drink would chase his shyness away. Puns, wit and wisdom rolled off Whitehead's lips in effortless succession. Charles Whitehead was at his best when he was drunk.

It was in public houses that Whitehead began to write verse. When he returned to his lodgings and lay on the covers of his bed, he continued composing into the early hours, scarcely concerned that he had to perform clerical duties the next day. His intention was to publish a book of verse, which he would entitle
The Solitary.
One line he composed mentioned a man buried in unconsecrated ground – ‘For whom no pray'r is read – no passing bell is toll'd!' – and he showed the line to a drinking companion the next day. ‘I was inspired by the prodigious quantities of liquor consumed by bell-ringers!' he said. This was followed by a rollicking laugh which his fellow clerks of the commercial office could never have
dreamt
he was capable of producing.

 

*

‘THE LIFE AND LITERARY CAREER
of Charles Whitehead,' said Mr Inbelicate, ‘are of some interest to us, Scripty, though we must deal briefly with many parts.'

Mr Inbelicate told of how Whitehead was dismissed from his position in the commercial house when his manager realised that, no matter how beautiful and precise his employee's handwriting, a messier clerk was preferable if he arrived on time. Whitehead was not at all distressed, and resolved that he would earn his crust from writing, in prose and in verse. Very often it
was
a crust.

The precariousness of a writer's life did not deter a rather fetching young lady, a certain Mary Ann Loomes, from taking an interest in Whitehead. They had met when he was still working in his father's wine shop. She entered the premises, caught him standing with his arms folded across his chest, looking into the distance, and she asked for his advice on port wine. As this was a subject which he could enliven with daring tales of his use of a paddle down the River Douro in white water, she was smitten. They married in 1833.

‘Charles and Mary Whitehead came to prefer the late night in their marital lodgings, between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m.,' said Mr Inbelicate, as we sat in the parlour before his everlasting fire, ‘because no bailiff knocked during those hours, and they felt safe from their debts.'

They often slept by day, but if awake, they lived a strange life of whispers and of creeping around in stockinged feet. The bailiffs were not fools, of course; one bailiff knocked for an hour, and then stopped, and returned five minutes later, and then ten minutes after that. During this time they could not talk to each other, they could not move, for the sharp ears of a bailiff would detect a page turned, perhaps even a breath. Their hearts scarcely dared to beat during those minutes when they wondered whether their tormentor had really gone or was merely waiting further down the corridor.