The Lambs of London (2 page)

D
ID I WAKE
you last night, Ma?”

“I was already awake. Mr. Lamb was restless.” Her husband had a habit of trying to urinate out of the bedroom window on to the street beneath, a habit to which Mrs. Lamb was strenuously opposed.

“You were very quiet, Charles.” Mary was now calm after her fit of coughing. “You went straight to your bed.”

“I live forever in your good report, Mary. The heavens shine down on such a sister.”

“I distinctly heard a noise from your room.” Mrs. Lamb was not impressed by their show of affection. “There was a crash.”

I
N FACT MARY
had helped her brother to mount the stairs, and had guided him towards his bedroom. She held his arm gently, and savoured the vinous scent of his breath mixed with the faintest odour of sweat on his neck and forehead. She enjoyed the sensation of his physical closeness, which in the past she had lost. He had been a boarder at Christ’s Hospital, and his departure at the beginning of each term provoked in her the strangest mixture of anger and loneliness. He was going to a world of companionship and learning, while she was left in the company of her mother and of Tizzy. This was the period when, her household tasks complete, she began to study. Her bedroom had been set up in a little back room on the attic floor. Here she kept the school-books which Charles had lent her—among them a Latin grammar, a Greek lexicon, Voltaire’s
Philosophical Dictionary
and a copy of
Don Quixote
. She tried to keep pace with her brother but often found, on his return, that she had over-reached him. She had begun to read and to translate the fourth book of the
Aeneid,
concerning the love between Dido and Aeneas, before he had even mastered the speeches of Cicero. She had said to him,
“At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura”;
but he had burst out laughing. “Whatever do you mean, dear?”

“It is Virgil, Charles. Dido is sorrowful.”

He laughed again, and ruffled her hair. She tried to smile but then lowered her head; she felt vain and foolish.

But there were other occasions when they would study together in the evenings, both of them poring over one book, their eyes alight as they pursued the same sentence. They would talk of Roderick Random and of Peregrine Pickle as if they were real people, and invent new scenes or adventures for Lemuel Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe. They would imagine themselves to be on Crusoe’s island, hiding in the foliage from the marauding cannibals. And then they would return to the intricacies of Greek syntax. He told her that she had become “a Grecian.”

A
CRASH
,
MA
?” He asked the question with a sense of injured innocence. He really did not know what she meant.

H
E HAD TOPPLED
on to his bed, and had immediately fallen into a profound sleep; it was as if he had finally escaped.

Mary untied his boots, and began to pull one off his right foot; but she slipped and fell backwards against his desk, knocking off a candlestick and a small brass bowl in which he kept spent lucifer matches. This was the crash that Mrs. Lamb, awake and alert across the landing, had heard. It had not woken Charles. In the silence which followed Mary gently put back the candlestick and the bowl; she removed his boots very slowly, and then lay down beside him. She put her arms around him and placed her head upon his chest, so softly that it rose and fell with his breathing. A few minutes later she crept up the stairs to her own little room.

A
FTER THE MEAL
was over it was customary, on Sunday, for Charles to read from the Bible to his parents and sister. He did not object to this in the least. He admired the artifice of the King James version. Its periodic balance, its cadence and its euphony had come upon him in childhood like the wind.
“‘I saw a dream which made me afraid, and the thoughts upon my bed and the visions of my head troubled me.’”
They had gathered in the drawing-room, where Mary had stood in the sunlight, and Charles was behind a small leaved table with the volume in his hand. “This, Pa, is the story of Nebuchadnezzar.”

“Is it indeed? How did he know when to cry?”

“When God chided him, Mr. Lamb.” Mrs. Lamb was very emphatic. “All flesh is grass.”

Instinctively Mary put her hand up to her face, as Charles continued his reading from Daniel.
“‘Therefore made I a decree to bring in all the wise men of Babylon before me, that they might make known unto me the interpretation of the dream.’”

chapter two

O
N THE FOLLOWING MORNING
Charles Lamb left the house in Holborn on his way to the East India House in Leadenhall Street. When he came out of Holborn Passage he joined the vast throng of pedestrians moving towards the City on this bright autumn morning. Yet he had seen something—he was sure of it—and he turned back. He had risen early, and he had at least one hour before he needed to sit before his high desk in the Dividend Office. Holborn Passage itself was little more than an alley, one of those dark threads woven into the city’s fabric which accumulate soot and dust over the centuries. There was a pipe shop here as well as a mantua-maker, a carpenter’s workshop and a bookshop. All of them wore with resignation the faded patina of age and abandonment. The gowns were discoloured, the pipes on display would never be smoked, and the workshop seemed untenanted. Yes. This was what he had seen. In the window of the bookshop was displayed a document, written in a sixteenth-century Secretary hand.

Charles loved all the tokens of antiquity. He had stood on the site of the old Aldgate pump, and imagined water being drawn from the wooden pipe five hundred years before; he had paced the line of the Roman wall, and noticed how the streets naturally conformed to it; he had lingered over the sundials in the Inner Temple, and traced their mottoes with his finger. “The future is as nothing, being everything,” he had once told Tom Coates in a moment of drunken inspiration. “The past is everything, being nothing.”

This Elizabethan document seemed to be a will; he was not a palaeographer, but he could make out the phrase “I bequethe.” A young man, standing in the dim interior of the shop, was staring at him from the other side of the window. With his pale face, and violently red hair, he seemed to Charles to be some kind of apparition. Then he smiled and opened the door. “Mr. Lamb?”

“The very same. How do you know my name?”

“You have been pointed out to me in the Salutation and Cat. I sit there sometimes at the back table. You would not have noticed me in the least. Come in, please.”

As soon as he entered the shop Charles could smell the moth-scented coverings of the old folios and quartos; it was the dust of learning he inhaled, delicious in its specialty. There was a wooden counter around two sides of the room, upon which were laid out manuscripts, unbound sheets and parchment rolls. On the shelves he could see the collected works of Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden and Cowley. “In some respects,” the young man said, noticing his glance, “the better a book is, the less it demands from the binding. To be strong-backed and neat bound is the desideratum of a volume.”

“Magnificence comes after?”

“If it comes at all. My name is Ireland, Mr. Lamb. William Henry Ireland.” They shook hands. “I would not dress a set of magazines, for instance, in full suit. There is no point in a Shakespeare in gorgeous apparel.”

Charles was surprised by this young man’s expertness. “You are quite right. The true lover of reading, Mr. Ireland, wishes for sullied leaves and worn-out appearance.”

“I know the difference, Mr. Lamb. I know the pages turned with delight, not with duty.”

“You do?” Here was a rare young man indeed.

William Ireland was, as Charles surmised, a youth of about seventeen years; in his cravat, shirt and bright yellow waistcoat he seemed a curiously old-fashioned figure. He ought to have been wearing a powdered wig. Yet his intensity was such that Charles was drawn to him. “I prefer the common editions of Shakespeare,” Ireland was saying, “without notes and without plates. Your Rowe or your Tonson delights me. On the contrary, I cannot read Beaumont and Fletcher but in folio. The octavo editions are painful to look at, don’t you think? I have no sympathy with them. I abhor them.” He had pale green eyes, which widened with the inflections of his voice; when he spoke he clasped his hands together, as if he were engaged in a violent struggle with himself. “Do you care for Drayton, Mr. Lamb?”

“Extremely.”

“Then this will interest you.” He took down from its shelf a quarto volume, neatly bound in calf. “This is Greene’s
Pandosto.
But note the inscription.” He opened the book, and handed it to Charles. On the frontispiece, traced in now faded ink, were the words
“Given to me, Mich. Drayton, by Will Sh.”

Charles knew well enough that
Pandosto
had been the source for
A Winter’s Tale.
And here was the book itself, the book that Shakespeare had held in his hands—just as he was holding it now. The sheer reciprocity of the gesture almost made him swoon.

William Ireland was looking at him intently, willing him to speak.

“It is a most remarkable thing.” Charles closed the book and carefully put it down upon the counter. “How did you acquire it?”

“From a gentleman’s library. He died last year. Father and I travelled down to Wiltshire. There were treasures there, Mr. Lamb. Treasures.” He placed the book upon the shelf, and spoke with his back turned. “Father owns the shop.”

H
E HAD TRAVELLED
with his father on the Salisbury coach, three weeks ago. They were late passengers, having booked their tickets only two days before, and were asked to sit in the open seats behind the driver and his three horses. “No, no,” Samuel Ireland had said. “I must travel within. This September air is piercing.”

“How is it possible, sir?” The driver, like all who encountered the elder Ireland, was subdued by his overbearing manner.

“I will tell you how it is possible. By doing it.” Mr. Ireland clambered into the coach, and turned to his son. “You may go on top, William. It will revive you.” He took off his beaver hat, offered elaborate courtesies to the only lady in the vehicle, and then slowly inserted himself between two male passengers like a cork being put back in a bottle. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said to each of them in turn. “Just one inch more, if you please. Profound apologies.”

William Ireland had already climbed the ladder, and crouched upon a seat as the stage rattled down Cornhill and Cheapside towards St. Paul’s. He looked up as the horses passed the cathedral. He could not imagine on what principles it had been constructed, or the serenity in the soul of the architect who had conceived it. The great dome was, for him, an alien thing.

He was by now quite accustomed to his father’s selfishness—except that he never would have used that word. He was peremptory, magisterial, eloquent. But he was a bookseller. He was only a tradesman. And William knew that he suffered exquisitely for that. His father’s regard for himself was his only way of continuing and enduring life.

There was a lock of horses and carriages on Ludgate Hill, and the stage slowly came to a halt. William looked back at the dome. He would never achieve anything that might rival this. He was the thing he was. Nothing more. In this momentary pause, above the sounds of London, he could hear his father’s voice in the carriage beneath. He was discoursing on the virtues of truffles.

The stage stopped at an inn in Bagshot, so that the outside passengers might be warmed. William sat by the small coal fire in the parlour, clutching a cup of hot porter; he was sitting with Beryl who, as he had already learnt, was a lady’s maid who had lost her position and was returning to her family in the country. “It’s not so much the leaving,” she said, “as the manner of the leaving.” She was utterly defiant. “Here’s two guineas, and out the door.” William did not wish to enquire too closely into the reasons for her dismissal but, judging by her demeanour, he suspected some back-stairs lust. “I took her shawl, anyway. She’ll never miss it. Where did you come by that kerchief?”

“My father’s.”

“Is he the one who does all the talking?” They had been the only passengers sitting on top of the stage, and had formed an unspoken alliance against those more comfortably placed.

“I’m afraid so.” Samuel Ireland was even then regaling his travelling companions with the true components of the drink known as “Stingo.” He might have been discussing the merits of Shakespeare. Anything he related became, of necessity, important. “How did you know that was my father?”

“He has your features. Except that yours are nicer. What’s your name?”

“William.”

“Bill? Or Will? Or would it be Willy?”

“William, actually.”

“William the Conqueror.” She looked down at the buttons on his trousers, for only a moment; but it was enough to stir him. He felt tense and excited, as if he were about to suffer some immense shock. He clutched his cup to stop his hands from shaking. “Is it standing up, William?”

“Yes. It is.”

“Is it big?”

“I don’t know. I have no—” He had never before been approached in this way. Even in the streets the prostitutes turned away from him as a boy, and a poor boy at that; he had pleasured himself, as he put it, but he had never done this.

The other passengers were enjoying all the smells and sensations of the inn, as if they were characters in a stage play entitled
The Parlour.
They were good-humoured, tolerant, disposed to laugh. Samuel Ireland, one arm raised in the air, was now modestly alluding to his friendship with Richard Brinsley Sheridan. William’s heart was beating faster. The coachman, having received two shillings from the landlord of the inn, came to the door of the parlour and asked them back to the coach. William rushed out, before any of the others could see him, and ascended the ladder to the roof of the stage. He saw Beryl walking slowly across the yard, and he put his hands between his legs. She climbed on to the roof and, with a smile, sat in the seat furthest from him. The coachman jumped into his box, raised his whip, and cried out to the horses. As they left the inn-yard Beryl came over to William, and put her hand upon his fly. Then she began to massage his inner thighs. The carriage jerked up and down the uneven surface of Bagshot High Street. It was essentially a country lane, paved at the expense of the landlord himself. No one from the road could see her hand—the driver looked ahead—and she paddled his cock with increasing vigour. When they came out into the open fields, travelling past small streams and copses of trees, fields and hedgerows, she hitched up her skirt and settled herself upon the roof of the carriage. Some wild geese flew overhead. He unbuttoned his trousers and lay down upon her. He could feel the cold wind rushing upon his face, and he sighed with delight. He moved gently within her. Then he grew stronger and more vigorous; as the coachman called out “Hi!” he came within her. They were riding through the hamlet of Blackwater, and so both of them lay very still in order to escape notice. He fumbled with his trousers, and secured the buttons, before getting to his feet. She still lay upon the roof, and looked up at the passing sky.

William’s first and greatest sensation was that of relief. He had done the unknown thing, and had not wavered. Beryl pulled up her under-drawers before clambering into her seat. Then, with a smile, she held out her hand. It was an unmistakable gesture.

“I only have a few sixpences,” he said.

“They’ll do.”

He felt in the pocket of his trousers, and gave her the coins. Together they gazed at the passing landscape, as they drove on to Stonehenge and Salisbury.

W
HAT KIND OF TREASURES
?” Charles was asking him as they stood in the bookshop together.

“An original
De Sphaera
from the printing shop of Manutius. A second edition of Erasmus, printed in France.”

These were not books that excited Charles’s imagination. He was more at ease among the old English authors. So he took down Greene’s
Pandosto
from the shelf where William had placed it. “Is this altogether too expensive?”

“Three guineas.” Charles noticed that he spoke in a harsh, impetuous manner, as if he were daring others to challenge him.

“Three guineas will buy a lot of books.”

“Not ones with such an owner.”

It was a week’s wage. Yet to own a book that had once been owned by Shakespeare—it was worth more than a week of his life. “I can leave you a guinea, and pay the rest when I come for the book.”

“No need to trouble yourself, Mr. Lamb. I am happy to bring it to you.” William Ireland went behind the counter, and brought out a leather-bound ledger. He took an ink-pot and quill from the pocket of his coat, much to Charles’s astonishment, and proceeded to write out the receipt. Charles noticed that he had a neat Chancery hand, quite unlike the Secretary hand he himself used for the Company’s accounts, and he complimented him upon it. “I learnt it from my father, Mr. Lamb. I take a good deal of pleasure in it. I use a Court hand for certain transactions. And a Text hand for the general business of life.”

“You will need an address.”

“I know the house.” He did not look up.

T
WO NIGHTS BEFORE
, William Ireland had led Charles home from the Salutation and Cat. Charles had been drinking there alone. He had been sitting at an old ebony table in a corner; on the wall behind him was an embroidered handkerchief in a glass case. Its motto had faded but the phrase “well bake a pie” could still be traced.

Charles was staring at nothing in particular. He was scratching his chin with his forefinger. He had often entertained the possibility of catching his elusive thoughts and placing them in sequence—so many impressions and associations, so many rambles around the mind—but he had not yet achieved it. He swallowed down another glass of curaçao, its sweetness now beginning to curdle in his stomach. But he did not wish to return to Laystall Street. He did not like the smell of the house at night, which reminded him of kitchen slops. He had no desire to see his parents, who seemed to close down the possibilities of life. And as for Mary, well, certainly he enjoyed her company. But there were times when her attention to him, intense and sensitive, repelled him. He needed her society to expand, to flourish, to become himself; she applauded him because she understood him. But when she made too large a claim upon him—when for example she questioned him too insistently about his friendships—he withdrew from her and became quiet. Then she in turn felt humiliated and rejected. So there were evenings when he drank alone.