Mr. Timothy: A Novel (29 page)

--Oh, Mr. Cratchit! One word, if you please.

And still the hand refuses to budge. And as I come round the desk, I half expect to find additional screens sprouting up on all sides, hand after hand, a palisade of fingers. But after a few paces, the vista is clear, and the view that opens before me is of an elderly, heavy-eared man with a pickled grin and a nod of practiced affability.

Squidgy.

Squidgy's face, at any rate, and his voice, too, shedding its disguise now and addressing me once again like a fellow clubman.

--You'll excuse my not hailing you ex officio, Timothy. One does have these pesky protocols to follow.

I stand before him, dredging for words, and the only candidates that emerge are:

--Is your back feeling better?

--Oh, my, yes.

--Not still...not still itching or anything?

--Hardly notice it now. But see here, Timothy, you really must stay away from the Sweet Sallys of the world. Mrs. Sharpe's girls are of a higher order, if that's what you're after. And while you're at it, stay away from the Sheldrakes of the world.

--You may be assured of that. --And do have someone look at that eye, it's a fright.

--Yes, thank you. Thank you, Mr....

Squidgy. That's what I want so desperately to call him: Mr. Squidgy. But if there is an alternative name, the gentleman in question is not saying. He hunches his shoulders over his game of patience; he proffers a half-salute.

--Off you go now. Trotty-trot.

Peter and Annie would prefer me to come home with them, but I have other errands to attend to, and so, apart from my profuse thanks, the only reward they receive for their pains this morning is the prospect of my retreating back. And still they follow me, in my mind: a pair of invisible rebukes on either side, mutating block by block into something slightly warmer.

I have need of warmth. In my confusion, I seem to have left my greatcoat in the station-house cell. Too late to go back for it--Lushing Leo has by now claimed ownership--and too cold to go entirely without. So I stop in an old-clothes shop and, for want of anything better, grab a tattered green comforter, which the dealer is willing to part with for a few shillings. And as I wrap it round my neck and shoulders and bear it down the street, its weight becomes indistinguishable from the weight of memory. For this is how Father used to travel, isn't it? Every working day, from the Royal Exchange all the way home to Bayham Street, he kept that moth-chewed comforter wrapped round him like ermine.

Surely now, at this moment of unexpected doubling, surely this is the time for him to reappear. But he is scrupulously absent as I make my way back to Craven Street. Or else I am less able to see him. My right eye has closed up almost completely, leaving nothing but a slot the size of a coin, and my left eye, by way of compensation, pulls too hard to port, dragging me off course, and as I stagger along the pavement, tracing my usual roundabout path, it dismays me to think I have become a spectacle, something that passersby must account for. As I climb the stairs to Gully's chambers, the apologia is forming in my throat:

There's a reason, you see. It happened like this....

And in my eagerness to explain myself, I nearly blurt everything to the brindled cat that has settled itself by Gully's door. A fat and lolling cat, even by this house's standards, enjoying the new amnesty, licking the puddle of milk that someone--Philomela, no doubt--has poured along the floor there. Licking so hard that the milk has turned clean red.

Chapter 17

THE DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITH A PUSH, and the trail of rust-coloured milk ribbons into the near distance before coagulating round the sprawled figure of Captain Gully.

His left arm lies crushed beneath him, and his stubby right arm is extended as though he were hailing a cab, and his eyes look straight at me, daring me to blink.
He is still, still as fallen snow. Even his blood has ceased to agitate, and over the gaping flap of his neck, there remains only a dull red matte, which the cat gives a few disconsolate licks before moving on.

All the other cats have vanished. Life itself has abandoned this space and left behind only husks. A pair of inert arms. A compacted torso. Two staring eyes.

I'm on my knees now, with no memory of having knelt. I'm on my knees, and from my closed mouth issues a long, keening moan, the sort the wind makes when it scours round a chimney crown. The sound rises and falls, and my body rises and falls with it, until my hand, grasping for a brace, closes round something hard and wooden: a strand of beads, mashed in sections, with the paint nearly chapped off from fingering.

Hail, Mary...Hail, Mary....

No, it's Philomela who knows the words, and she's not here. My only litany is the sentence that flies round the circuits of my brain, in endless loops, forestalling the inevitable:

O forgive me. O forgive me.

The horror comes on all the same. The horror of that small definite incision across the carotid artery. The clean flat sharp blade that made it. I know that blade. I have seen it, I have seen the man who wields it. Nothing can shut them out.

Minutes pass...years pass...the truth becomes only less assimilable. I lower my head towards Gully's, I rest my forehead on his. The chill is almost enough to make me pull away, and yet there must be a residual heat, too, for I find I can linger there, at least until I look into his eyes, which are another story altogether--colder than any other part of him, and further away. It is the eyes that send the doleful news. Gully is gone.

Best, kindest of men: gone.

And now the fury gathers inside me, gathers and rises, hisses through my skin, and my mouth opens in anticipation of the scream to come, but it is only the same old litany, mumbled in Gully's cold ear.

O forgive me. O forgive me.

Too bad: Gully's power of dispensation has vanished with him. The words bounce off him like bent arrows.

And yet, as I kneel there on the floor, I begin to feel, against all odds, a kind of benison at work, casting the room in a new slanting light, illuminating the mournful procession of Gully's belongings. One by one, they pay their tribute: the Dutch clock, the tiny coal scuttle, the rope of privet over the door.

And there, on the floor by Gully's chair, one of his dog-eared atlases, still open.

Why I should take the trouble of picking it up I can't say. I already know what page it's opened to. I can hear the good captain himself, invoking the olive groves and the stone towers and the coffee-skinned women...as if he were whispering in my ear. Just as he was whispering in her ear, probably, when they came for him.

Majorca. You'll see. Changes a man forever.

The page tears off easily, and it rolls up even more easily, into a fife-size scroll. From there, it is simply a matter of turning Gully on his back--avoiding the face for the time being, avoiding the cambric shirt, with its strange diagonal sash of red, avoiding everything but the box wrench protruding from the cavity of his left arm.

Into that wrench's orifice I insert the scrolled-up map. I kneel, I murmur in Gully's ear.

--You may go anywhere you like now, Captain. The world is yours.

But, as always, I am too late with my tidings. For Gully has quit this world, that becomes only more definite with each passing minute. Gully has flown to the next place, and left his chrysalis to rot here on the floor.

And still some of him remains. It is oddly comforting to look down at my hands and find them smeared with the sticky residue of Gully's blood. Not even the comforter will wipe them completely clean. In this way, in this way, I will carry Gully with me. And the longer I kneel by him, with one bloody hand on his brow, the more I believe I am travelling with him, escorting him into the next world.

They will be glad to have him, I know, but what of me? What will they make of me? Nothing to do but send me back, to the ground of my sins.

And already I hear the old world calling to me. A mewling sound that I attribute to Gully's cats until it acquires a more human dimension, a plaintive timbre.

Rising to my feet, I follow the sound--in circles, for it seems to be coming from all quadrants. And then, as my ears sharpen, the sound does, too. It settles in the far corner of Gully's chamber, and as I approach, it concentrates into form: a small huddled shaking figure, head between its knees.

Colin the unmelodious.

To a true Christian gentleman, I know, this would be an opportunity for solace. Why, then, does the sight of him inflame me with the whitest rage? Why, instead of laying a gentling hand on his shoulders, do I haul him straight up in the air and slam him against the wall?

He is too far gone, fortunately, to be shocked. His eyes have winced shut, and his head drifts to port, and even the sound of my yelling cannot make much of a dent in him.

--How long have you been here?

I shake him, shake him hard, until the words come coughing out.

--Don't know.

--Did you see it happen?

--No.

I grab his chin, force his head up. I glare into his waterlogged face. --You're lying.

--I stopped in, that's all. Same as you.

--You're lying.

--Honest, Mr. Timothy, I was--

--What? What?

--I was bringin' 'em gifts.

And then, from his limp hand, two bundles fall to the floor. A white handkerchief, trimmed with violet lace, and a miniature globe, two inches in diameter--the earth writ small.

--They was for Christmas, like.

His voice has a dying fall, and on any other day, I think, seeing him this way--so wholly stripped of his customary armour--would have thawed me. But not today. Today I am a column of ice.

--Did you
steal
them, Colin?

And this, oddly enough, is the very thing to prick him back into volubility.

--It were my own money, I swear. I got lucky yesterday, bet on a prize cock with the money you gave me, and I was meanin' to have a bit of a lark, it's not often I get two quid....

Such is the pitch of his hysteria I'm sure he would go on talking, all through the night and clear on to New Year's, but for the realisation that stops his mouth in midmotion.

--I didn't need to go to that cockfight, Mr. Timothy. I oughta have come here 'stead. I oughta have been here....

He sinks back to the floor, gouging the tears from his eyes.

--God help me, I oughta have
been
here.

--Why? So they might have killed you, too? How would that have served Gully?

The mere mention of his name draws our eyes back to that figure on the floor--even smaller in death, I think, than he was in life.

I bow my head. I say:

--He is on my conscience, Colin. Not yours.

On my conscience forever, I should add. But that hardly seems necessary. Once again, I kneel by that squat form. From behind me comes the tentative shuffling of Colin's feet, the soft hiccoughing of his chest.

--He were a good sort, the captain. --Yes. The finest.

He pauses for a few seconds, then asks:

--What they done with Filly?

--I don't know, Colin.

--Kilt her, likely.

With a raw wonder, I unclasp the fingers of my left hand. The rosary beads rest in my palm, like a dowager's stolen necklace.

How quick they must have been. She would have reached for these before anything else.

But if they did kill her, why didn't they leave her body with Gully's? Dragging a corpse down to the pier would have served no purpose. If all they wanted was her silence, it would have been easier, surely, to leave her here.

No, they didn't kill her.

--She's still alive.

I say it under my breath, but still Colin must hear, for he draws a little closer and, in a small voice, asks:

--What they want with her, then?

--I don't know.

Rising to my feet, I give Philomela's beads a final worrying, then shove them into my trouser pocket.

--We shall find her, Colin. You and I.

And then kill them.

But that hardly needs voicing, does it? It's what she asked us to do, after all:
We kill them
.

And you, you overcivilised fool, upbraided her for her presumption. Wasted your time with Scotland Yard and licorice, with Sheldrakes and Squidgies, when all along you should have been following that simple injunction.

Kill them. Or they kill us.

How does arriving at such a determination change a man? I don't feel any different. The room itself hasn't changed. And yet the air is stiller, and Colin is quite noticeably shrinking from me.

--You sure you're all right, Mr. Timothy? Coz from the looks of things, they banged you but good, and you know how a fellow can get when he's had the senses knocked out of him.... I motion him towards me. And in the ensuing seconds, every misgiving that Colin has ever entertained seems to roll across his face, and it is probably a tribute to Gully that he does eventually come, that he assumes this attitude of submission, so contrary to his nature.

--Listen to me, Colin. I need you to do something. Can you do it?

He nods, briefly.

--You're to go to Scotland Yard. Do you understand?

Another nod.

--You're to ask for Inspector Surtees. Not another living soul will do--it is Surtees or nobody. And if he is out of office, then you are to wait for him. As long as it takes. Can you do that?