The Lambs of London (3 page)

He considered it foolish to suppose that alcohol was a source of inspiration. He knew that it constrained his imagination, confining it to the layers of drunken perception. When he was drunk, he was oblivious to detail or perspective. Yet he welcomed, and actively sought, this state. It relieved him from fear and responsibility. But what did he fear? He feared his own failure. He feared his future. One of his school companions, Tobias Smith, had left Christ’s Hospital without a post or vocation. He had lived with his mother for a while in Smithfield and, in the tavern or playhouse, seemed to be as gay and vivacious as ever. Yet he had declined. His clothes had become threadbare. When his mother died, he was thrown out of the shared lodgings. He seemed to disappear. But then, three weeks ago, Charles had seen him begging on the corner of Coleman Street. He passed him without showing any sign of recognition. He had been afraid. So now he drank the curaçao.

He savoured the sensations of slipping into drunkenness. He could not recall his state of infancy, but he guessed that it must have been something like this—this blissful reception of circumstance, this happy acceptance of everything in the world. He went up to the counter and ordered another glass. He sensed his need to talk even as he asked the landlord a question about that evening’s customers. He wanted to divulge news about himself; he wanted to laugh out loud at someone else’s wit.

“This one will be the last, Mr. Lamb.”

“Of course. Yes.”

And then he found himself sprawled upon his bed, fully dressed. He could recall nothing from the night before. He had images of giant shadows in turmoil, of an outstretched arm, of a whispered word. He had no recollection of William Ireland, who had been seated by the door of the Salutation and Cat; Ireland had in fact been partially obscured by a wooden pillar around which various advertisements—for a harlequinade, for an exhibition of acrobatics—had been pasted.

Charles had returned to his seat from the counter; he had thrown back his head and drained the last glass of curaçao. He had risen unsteadily to his feet, and then moved wide-eyed in the general direction of the door. He had said, out loud,
“You that way, we this way.”

William Ireland got up from his chair and, with great gentleness, helped Charles into the street. The drunken man would become an immediate target of pick-pockets, or worse, and so he guided him away from Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

“Where do you lodge, sir?”

Charles laughed at the question. “I lodge in eternity.”

“That may be difficult to find.” Yet Charles walked along King Street and Little Queen Street, towards Laystall Street, instinctively turning towards home. “You quoted from Shakespeare just then. ‘
You that way, we this way
.’
Love’s Labour’s Lost
.”

“Did I? This way now.”

A member of the local watch passed and shone a lantern in William’s face. “My friend is tired,” William said. “I am accompanying him home.” Calling Charles his friend allowed a degree of intimacy. He linked arms with him and steadied him as they turned into Laystall Street.

William had heard and seen him before in the Salutation and Cat. Charles often sat there with his companions. They talked loudly about the latest plays and publications; they argued over philosophy, or the merits of certain actresses. Ireland himself was always alone and, sitting in his customary place by the door, listened eagerly. He could make out bursts or gusts of conversation, and had in particular been impressed by an oration given by Charles on the virtues of Dryden as opposed to Pope. William had discovered, too, that Charles wrote for the periodicals; he had overheard his discussion of a proposed essay on the topic of poor relations. “They are always smiling and they are always embarrassed,” he was saying to Tom Coates and Benjamin Milton. “And they are a puzzle to the servants, who are fearful of being either too obsequious or too uncivil.”

“But you have no servants.”

“Is Tizzy nothing? A toast to Tizzy! A toast to no one!”

William had himself submitted an essay to the
Pall Mall Review,
on Renaissance bindings, but it had been rejected on the grounds that it was “too singular a subject for a general readership.” He had not been surprised by this response. His ambition was matched only by his self-distrust; he aspired to success but expected failure. So he listened to Charles with envy and admiration; he envied those around him, too, who seemed thoroughly at home in the world of literature and journalism. If he could become acquainted with Mr. Lamb, then he might enter this charmed fellowship.

He hoped, too, that he might follow Charles Lamb’s own path. To write—to be published—these were his ambitions. His essay for the
Pall Mall Review
had been his only attempt at publication. But he had also written certain odes and sonnets. He thought highly of his “Ode on Liberty. On the Occasion of Napoleon’s Return to France from Egypt,” but he knew that, in the present circumstances, it could not be printed in the English journals. In other odes he had railed against England’s “muddy darkness” and “dreary bounds.” In his sonnets he had pursued a vein of more private sentiment, and in one sequence had charted the history of a “man of feeling” who was ignored or ridiculed by “the brute mass of humankind.” He had not shown these works to anyone but had kept them locked in his writing-case, from which he occasionally took them out and read them over. He considered them to be the centre of his true life, but there was no one on earth with whom he could share them. As he had once written:

Still and inert my mental powers lie

Without the quick’ning spark of Sympathy.

He believed that he might obtain that from Charles Lamb and his friends. But he could never have crossed the room. There was a gulf too deep; it was the gulf of self-abnegation.

W
ILLIAM GUIDED CHARLES
down the narrow street, avoiding the pump and making sure that he did not fall against the damp and sooty brick wall of the bakery on the corner. It was called “Stride. Our Baker.” Every weekday morning—what he called a “school morning”—Charles would pick up a penny loaf and eat it on his way to Leadenhall Street. Now he passed it without recognition. Only by instinct did he climb the steps from the cobbled pavement to his own door. William stood behind him as he fumbled for his keys, but then the door was opened by a young woman. William walked quickly down Laystall Street, for some reason fearful of being seen by her.

But Mary Lamb had not noticed him at all, intent only on helping her brother once more across the threshold of their little house.

H
OW DO YOU
know it?”

“How do I know your address, Mr. Lamb? I escorted you home the other evening. There is no reason why you should remember.” He managed to suggest that it was his own insignificance, rather than Charles’s drunkenness, that had caused this lapse of memory.

“From the Salutation?”

William nodded.

Charles had grace enough to blush; but his voice was composed. He had a strange relationship with his drunken self; he considered him to be an unhappy and unfortunate acquaintance to whom he had become accustomed. He would neither defend him nor apologise for him. He would simply recognise his existence. “Well, I am obliged to you.

Could you call this evening?”

They shook hands. Charles stepped out of the bookshop, looking left and right before he walked out of the dark passage into High Holborn. He joined the throng of carriages and pedestrians, all moving eastward into the City. It was for him a motley parade, part funeral procession and part pantomime, evincing to him the fullness and variety of life in all its aspects—before the City swallowed it up. The sound of footsteps on the cobbles mingled with the rumble of the carriage wheels and the echo of horse hooves to make what Charles considered to be a uniquely city sound. It was the music of movement itself. There were caps and bonnets and hats bobbing in the distance; there were purple frock-coats and green jackets, striped topcoats and checked surtouts, umbrellas and great woollen parti-coloured shawls, all around him. Charles himself always dressed in black and, being surprisingly angular, he resembled a young and awkward clergyman. A flying pie man knew him by sight, and sold him a veal pastie.

He was part of the crowd. There were times when this brought him comfort, when he considered himself to be part of the texture of life. There were occasions when it merely reinforced his sense of failure. More often than not, however, it spurred his ambition. He envisaged the days when, from his comfortable library or writing-room, he would be able to hear the crowd passing by.

He knew the road so well that he scarcely noticed it. He was borne along past Snow Hill and Newgate, along Cheapside, and up Cornhill, until he found himself in Leadenhall Street. It was as if he had been fired from a cannon into the pillared portico of the East India House. It was an old mansion house, from the days of Queen Anne, built of brick and stone and powerfully reinforced by a great cupola that cast a shadow on an already dark and dusty Leadenhall Street. Charles squeezed the arm of the door-keeper as he passed him, and whispered, “Vermiculated rustication.” They had been debating, the previous Saturday, the name of the worm-like ornamentation on the base of the building where it met the street. The door-keeper put a hand to his forehead, and pretended to topple back in astonishment.

Charles passed into the entrance hall, the quick patter of his shoes sending little flickers of noise among the marble pillars, and he mounted the great ornamental staircase two steps at a time.

There were six clerks in the Dividend Office where Charles worked. Their desks were set up in the pattern of an inverted V—or, as Charles put it, “like a flight of geese”—with the head clerk at the front. There was a long low table running down the middle of this formation, supporting various leather-bound volumes of accounts and registers. Each clerk sat on a high-backed chair behind his desk, with pen and ink and blotter neatly arranged. Benjamin Milton sat in front of Charles, Tom Coates behind.

Benjamin turned when he heard the familiar scrape of the chair. “Good morning to you, Charlie. It was never merry in England till you were born.”

“I know. I am witty in myself, and the cause of wit in others.”

Benjamin was a short, slim youth, dark-haired and handsome. Charles called him “the pocket-sized Garrick” after the late actor-manager. Like Garrick, Benjamin seemed to be perpetually cheerful.

Tom Coates arrived, crooning the latest ballad melody. He was always in love, and always in debt. He would weep copiously at a romance in the penny-gaffs and then, at the next moment, begin to laugh at his own sentimentality. “I love my mother,” he said. “She has knitted me these gloves.” Charles did not turn round to admire them. The head clerk, Solomon Jarvis, had risen from his seat and was about to distribute the single-column and double-column ledgers. Jarvis was a grave man, an employee for forty years who still felt it an honour to be an East India clerk. Whatever ambition or aspiration he had once harboured, it had come to nothing. Yet he was not a disappointed man—serious, solemn, but not disappointed. He was one of the last clerks to wear his hair powdered and frizzed out in the old manner; it was not clear whether he preferred the fashion of the previous reign out of stubborn antiquarianism or out of some hallowed remembrance of his appearance as a “beau” or “macaroni.” In any case he was, as Benjamin used to say, “a living obelisk.” He was also addicted to snuff, and would take out vast quantities from the pockets of his ancient rust-coloured waistcoat. Charles claimed in fact that his hair was covered in snuff rather than powder, but the theory was never put to the test.

“Gentlemen,” Jarvis was saying, “a dividend day will soon be upon us. Shall we calculate? Shall we work on the warrants?”

They wrote out their numbers beneath a fresco by Sir James Thornhill, showing Industry and Prosperity being greeted on the shore of the Bay of Calcutta by three Indian princes who held in their hands the various fruits of that region. In exchange Industry offered a hoe while Prosperity showed them a pair of golden scales. Charles was more interested in the painted sea and landscape. He would put his hands behind his head and gaze at the ceiling, letting his eyes wander among the distant blues and greens. He imagined the thud of the ocean on foreign shores, and the whisper of a warm breeze among the flowing trees, until he was roused by the scratching of the pens all around him.

He was writing down three round O’s, at the end of a calculation, when the bell sounded at the conclusion of that day’s labour. Tom Coates was already by his chair. “What sayest thou, Charlie? Just the one?” They were joined by Benjamin Milton, who put his hand to his lips and imitated the call of a bugle.

“Well,” Charles replied. “Just the one.”

The three young men clattered out of the building into Leadenhall Street. They walked quickly over the stones, their hands in their pockets, their black frock-coats fluttering out behind them; they turned into Billiter Street, patting the flanks of the horses as they dodged between them, and strode into the welcome warmth of the Billiter Inn, where the low murmur of voices and the sweet smell of porter surrounded them. They found a booth, and flung themselves into it. Benjamin skipped over to the counter. At times like this Charles felt himself to be a deeply historical personage. Every movement and gesture he made had already been endlessly repeated in this place. The low murmur and the sweet smell of drink were the past itself, covering him and laying claim to him. He could say nothing that had not been uttered before. “I weep at cradles and I smile at graves. Your good health, Ben.” He took the pewter mug from his colleague and swallowed a great draught of ale. “I drink this in the line of duty.”

“Of course.” Tom Coates raised his mug. “Sheer necessity. No pleasure to be found in it.”

“I salute my fate.” Benjamin joined his mug with theirs.