Читать книгу The Map of Time - Felix J. Palma - Страница 7

Chapter I

Andrew Harrington would gladly have died several times over if that meant not having to choose just one pistol from among his father’s vast collection in the living-room cabinet. Decisions had never been Andrew’s strong point. On close examination, his life had been a series of mistaken choices, the last of which threatened to cast its lengthy shadow over the future. But that life of unedifying blunders was about to end. This time he was sure he had made the right decision, because he had decided not to decide. There would be no more mistakes in the future because there would be no future. He was going to destroy it completely by putting one of those guns to his right temple. He could see no other solution: obliterating the future was the only way for him to eradicate the past.

He scanned the contents of the cabinet, the lethal assortment his father had lovingly assembled after his return from the war. He was fanatical about those weapons, though Andrew suspected it was not so much nostalgia that drove him to collect them as his desire to contemplate the novel ways mankind kept coming up with for taking one’s own life outside the law. In stark contrast to his father, Andrew was impassive as he surveyed the apparently docile, almost humdrum implements that had brought thunder to men’s fingertips and freed war from the unpleasantness of hand-to-hand combat.

He tried to imagine what kind of death might be lurking inside each of them, lying in wait like some predator. Which would his father have recommended he use to blow his brains out? He calculated that death from one of those antiquated muzzle-loading flintlocks, which had to be refilled with gunpowder and a ball, then tamped down with a paper plug each time it was fired, would be a noble but drawn-out and tedious affair. He preferred the swift death guaranteed by one of the more modern revolvers nestling in their luxurious velvet-lined wooden cases.

He considered a Colt single-action model, which looked easy to handle and reliable – but he had seen Buffalo Bill brandishing one in his Wild West Adventures: a pitiful attempt to re-enact his transoceanic exploits with a handful of imported Red Indians and a dozen lethargic, apparently opium-sated buffalo. Death for him was not just another adventure. He also rejected a fine Smith & Wesson, the gun that had killed the outlaw Jesse James, of whom he considered himself unworthy, and a Webley specially designed to hold back the charging hordes in Britain’s colonial wars; he thought it looked too cumbersome.

His attention turned next to his father’s favourite, a fine Pepperbox with rotating barrels, but he seriously doubted whether this ridiculously ostentatious weapon would be capable of firing a bullet with enough force.

Eventually he settled on an elegant 1870 Colt with mother-of-pearl inlay that would take his life with all the delicacy of a woman’s caress. He smiled defiantly as he plucked it from the cabinet, remembering how often his father had forbidden him to meddle with his pistols. But the illustrious William Harrington was in Italy at that moment, no doubt reducing the Fontana de Trevi to dust with his critical gaze. His parents’ decision to leave for Europe on the very day he had chosen to kill himself had been a happy coincidence. He doubted that either of them would ever decipher the true message concealed in his gesture (that he had preferred to die as he had lived – alone), but for Andrew it was enough to imagine the disgust on his father’s face when he discovered his son had killed himself behind his back and without his permission.

He opened the cabinet where the ammunition was kept and loaded six bullets into the chamber. He supposed that one would be enough, but who knew what might happen? After all, he had never killed himself before. Then he tucked the gun, wrapped in a cloth, inside his coat pocket, as though it were a piece of fruit he would eat later. In a further act of defiance, he left the cabinet door open. If only he had shown this much courage before, he thought. If only he had dared confront his father when it had mattered, she would still be alive. But by the time he had, it was too late. And he had spent eight long years paying for his hesitation. Eight years, during which his pain had only worsened, spreading its tendrils through him like poison ivy, wrapping itself around his guts, gnawing at his soul. Despite the efforts of his cousin Charles and the distraction of other women’s bodies, his grief over Marie’s death refused to be laid to rest. Tonight, though, it would all be over.

Twenty-six was a good age to die, he reflected, contentedly fingering the bulge in his pocket. He had the gun. Now all he needed was a suitable spot in which to perform the ceremony. And there was only one possible place.

With the weight of the revolver in his pocket comforting him like a good-luck charm, he descended the grand staircase of the Harrington mansion in elegant Kensington Gore, a stone’s throw from the Queen’s Gate entrance to Hyde Park. He had not intended to cast any farewell glances at the walls of what had been his home for almost three decades, but he could not help feeling a perverse wish to pause before his father’s portrait, which dominated the hall. His father stared down at him disapprovingly from the gilt frame, a proud, commanding figure, bursting out of the old uniform he had worn as a young infantryman in the Crimean War until a Russian bayonet had punctured his thigh; the wound had left him with a disturbingly lopsided gait. William Harrington surveyed the world disdainfully, as though in his view the universe was a botched affair on which he had long since given up. What fool had been responsible for the untimely blanket of fog that had descended on the battlefield outside the besieged city of Sebastopol so that nobody could see the tips of the enemy’s bayonets? Who had decided that a woman was the ideal person to preside over England’s destiny? Was the east really the best place for the sun to rise?

Andrew had never seen his father without cruel animosity in his eyes so could not know whether he had been born with it or had been infected with it when fighting alongside the ferocious Ottomans in the Crimea. In any event, it had not vanished, like a mild case of smallpox, leaving no mark on his face, even though the path that had opened in front of him on his return could only have been termed a fortunate one. What did it matter that he had to hobble along it with the aid of a stick? Without having had to enter any pact with the Devil, the man with the bushy moustache and clean-cut features depicted on the canvas had overnight become one of the richest men in England. Trudging around in that distant war, bayonet at the ready, he could never have dreamed of possessing a fraction of what he now owned. How he had amassed his fortune, though, was one of the family’s best-kept secrets, a complete mystery to Andrew.

The tedious moment is now approaching when the young man must decide which hat and overcoat to pick from among the heap in the hall cupboard: one has to look presentable even for death. This is a scene that, knowing Andrew, could take several exasperating minutes and, since I see no need to describe it, I shall take the opportunity to welcome you to this tale, which has just begun, and which, after lengthy reflection, I chose to begin at this juncture and not another – as though I, too, had to select a single beginning from among the many jostling for position in the closet of possibilities.

Assuming you stay until the end, some of you, no doubt, will think I chose the wrong thread with which to begin spinning my yarn, and that for accuracy’s sake I should have respected chronological order and begun with Miss Haggerty’s story. Perhaps so – but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and this may be one of them.

So, let’s forget about Miss Haggerty for the moment, forget that I ever mentioned her, even, and go back to Andrew, who has just stepped forth from the mansion suitably dressed in a hat and coat, and even a pair of warm gloves to protect his hands from the harsh winter cold.

Once outside the mansion, the young man paused at the top of the steps, which unfurled at his feet like a wave of marble down to the garden. From there, he surveyed the world in which he had been brought up, suddenly aware that, if things went to plan, he would never see it again. Night was spreading its veil over the Harrington residence. A hazy full moon hung in the sky, bathing in its soft glow the immaculate lawns surrounding the house, most of them cluttered with flowerbeds, hedges and oversized stone fountains – dozens of them – decorated with excessively ornate sculptures of mermaids, fauns and other mythical creatures. His father had accumulated such a large number because, an unsophisticated soul, his only way of showing off his importance was to buy a lot of expensive and useless objects. In the case of the fountains his extravagance was excusable, because they combined to soothe the night with their watery refrain, making the listener want to close his eyes and forget everything except their hypnotic burble.

Further off, beyond the neatly clipped lawns, stood the immense greenhouse, graceful as a swan poised for flight, where his mother spent most of the day marvelling at the exotic flowers that sprouted from seeds brought back from the colonies.

Andrew gazed at the moon for several minutes. He wondered whether man would ever be able to travel there, as had the characters in Jules Verne and Cyrano de Bergerac’s works. What would he find if he did manage to land on its shimmering surface – in an airship, or shot out of a cannon, or with a dozen bottles of dew strapped to his body in the hope that, as it evaporated, he would float up to the sky, like the Gascon swashbuckler’s hero? Ariosto the poet had turned the planet into a warehouse where lunatics’ reason was stored in phials, but Andrew was more drawn to Plutarch, who imagined that the moon was where dead people dwelled. Andrew liked to picture them living at peace in ivory palaces built by an army of worker angels or in caves dug out of that white rock, waiting for the living to receive their safe-conduct to death and to carry on their lives anew, exactly where they had left off.

Sometimes he imagined that Marie was living at that very moment in one of those grottoes, oblivious to what had happened to her, and grateful that death had offered her a better existence than life. Marie, pale in that white splendour, waiting patiently for him to decide once and for all to blow his brains out and come to fill the empty space in her bed.

He stopped gazing at the moon when he noticed that Harold, the coachman, had followed his orders and was standing at the foot of the stairs with a brougham at the ready. As soon as he saw his young master descending the flight of steps, the coachman rushed to open the carriage door. Andrew had always been amused by Harold’s display of energy, considering it incongruous in a man approaching sixty, but the coachman clearly kept in good shape.

‘Miller’s Court,’ the youth commanded.

Harold was astonished by his request. ‘But, sir, that’s where—’

‘Is there some problem, Harold?’ Andrew interrupted.

The coachman stared at him for a moment, his mouth hanging ludicrously half open, then recollected himself: ‘None whatsoever, sir.’

Andrew gave a nod, signalling that the conversation was at an end. He climbed into the brougham and sat down on the red velvet seat. Glimpsing his reflection in the window, he gave a sigh of despair. Was that haggard countenance really his? It was the face of someone whose life had been seeping out of him unawares, like a pillow losing its stuffing through an open seam.

In a certain sense this was true. Although his face retained the harmonious good looks he had been born with, it now resembled an empty shell, a vague impression in a mound of ashes. The sorrow that had cast a shadow over his soul had taken its toll on his appearance: he could scarcely recognise himself in the ageing youth, with hollowed cheeks, downcast eyes and unkempt beard, who stared back at him in the glass. Grief had stunted him, transforming him into a dried-up, sullen creature.

The brougham rocked as Harold, having overcome his astonishment, clambered up to his perch, and took Andrew’s attention away from the blurred face sketched on the canvas of the night. The final act of the disastrous performance that had been his life was about to begin, and he was determined to savour every moment. He heard the whip crack above his head and, caressing the steely bulge in his pocket, he let himself be lulled by the vehicle’s gentle sway.

The brougham left the mansion and went down Carriage Drive, which bordered the lush vegetation of Hyde Park. Gazing through the window at the city, Andrew thought that in less than half an hour’s time they would be in the East End. This ride had always fascinated and puzzled him in equal measure: it allowed him to glimpse in a single sweep every aspect of his beloved London, the world’s greatest metropolis, the giant head of an insatiable octopus whose tentacles stretched over almost a fifth of the Earth’s surface, holding Canada, India, Australia and a large part of Africa in its vice-like grip.

As they sped east, the salubrious, almost countrified atmosphere of Kensington soon gave way to the crowded urban environment of Piccadilly, and beyond to the Circus, where Anteros, the avenger of unrequited love, is firing an arrow into the city’s heart. Beyond Fleet Street, the middle-class dwellings seemingly huddled around St Paul’s Cathedral gradually came into view, until finally, once they had passed the Bank of England and Cornhill Street, a wave of poverty swept over everything, a poverty that people from the adjoining West End knew of only from the satirical cartoons in Punch. It seemed to pollute the very air itself, as it mingled with the stench rising from the Thames.

Andrew had last made this journey eight years earlier, and had known ever since that, sooner or later, he would make it again, for the very last time. Hardly surprising, then, that as they drew nearer to Aldgate, the gateway to Whitechapel, he felt slightly uneasy. He peered warily out of the window as they entered the district, experiencing the same misgivings as he had in the past. He was overwhelmed, again, by shame because he was spying on an alien world with the dispassionate interest of someone who studies insects – even though, over time, his initial revulsion had turned into compassion for the souls who inhabited this place, where the city dumped its human waste.

Now it seemed that there was every reason for him to feel compassion still: London’s poorest borough had changed relatively little in the past eight years. Wealth brings poverty in its wake, thought Andrew, as they crossed the ill-lit, rowdy streets, crammed with stalls and handcarts, and teeming with wretched creatures whose lives were played out beneath the menacing shadow of Christ Church. At first he had been shocked to discover that behind the dazzle of the city’s façade there existed this outpost of hell where, with the Queen’s blessing, human beings were condemned to live like beasts. The intervening years had made him less naïve: he was no longer surprised that, even as the advances of science were transforming London – and the well-to-do amused themselves by recording their dogs’ barks onto the wax-coated cylinders of phonographs or conversed via telephone under the glow of Robertson’s electric lamps – Whitechapel had remained immune to progress, untouchable beneath its rotten shell, drowning in its own filth.

A glance was enough to tell him that crossing into this world was still like sticking his hand into a hornets’ nest. It was here that poverty showed its ugliest face, here that the same jarring, sinister tune was playing. He observed a couple of pub brawls, heard screams from the depths of dark alleyways, glimpsed a few drunks sprawled in the gutter, gangs of street urchins stripping them of their shoes, and exchanged glances with a pair of pugnacious-looking men standing on street corners, petty rulers in this parallel kingdom of vice and crime.

The luxurious brougham caught the attention of several prostitutes, who shouted lewd proposals to him, hitching up their skirts and showing their cleavage. Andrew felt a pang of sorrow as he gazed upon this pitiful spectacle. Most of the women were filthy and downtrodden, their bodies bearing the mark of their daily burden of customers. Even the youngest and prettiest were stained by the misery of their surroundings. He was revisited by the agonising thought that he might have saved one of these doomed women, offered her a better life than the one her Creator had allotted her, yet he had failed to do so.

His sorrow reached a crescendo as the carriage rattled past the Ten Bells, emitting an arpeggio of creaks as it turned into Crispin Street on its way to Dorset Street, passing in front of the Britannia pub where he had first spoken to Marie. This street was his final destination. Harold pulled the brougham up next to the stone arch leading to the Miller’s Court flats, and climbed off the box to open the carriage door.

Andrew stepped out, feeling suddenly dizzy. His legs were shaking as he looked around him. Everything was exactly as he remembered it, down to the shop with grimy windows run by McCarthy, the owner of the flats, which stood beside the entrance. Nothing he saw indicated to him that time also passed in Whitechapel, that it did not avoid it, as did the bigwigs and bishops visiting the city.

‘You can go home now, Harold,’ he told the coachman, who was standing at his side.

‘What time shall I fetch you, sir?’ asked the old man.

Andrew didn’t know what to say. He stifled a laugh. The only thing fetching him would be the cart from the Golden Lane morgue, the same one that had come there to fetch what was left of his beloved Marie eight years ago. ‘Forget you ever brought me here,’ was his reply.

The sombre expression that clouded the coachman’s face moved Andrew. Had Harold understood what he had come there to do? He could not be sure, because he had never given a moment’s thought to the coachman’s intelligence, or indeed to that of any servant. He always thought that at most they possessed the innate cunning of people who, from an early age, are obliged to swim against the current in which he and his class manoeuvred with ease. Now, though, he thought he detected in old Harold’s attitude an unease that might only have come from his having guessed Andrew’s intention.

And the servant’s capacity for deduction was not the only discovery Andrew made during that brief moment when, for once, they looked directly at each other. Andrew also became aware of something hitherto unimaginable to him: the affection a servant can feel for his master. Although he saw them as shadows drifting in and out of rooms, according to some invisible design, only aware of them when he needed to leave his glass on a tray or wanted the fire lighting, these phantoms could care about what happened to their masters. That succession of faceless people – the maids whom his mother dismissed on the flimsiest grounds, the cooks systematically impregnated by the stable boys as though conforming to some ancient ritual, the butlers who left their employ with excellent references for another mansion identical to theirs – made up a shifting landscape that Andrew had never taken the trouble to notice.

‘Very well, sir,’ murmured Harold.

Andrew understood that these words were the coachman’s last farewell; that this was the old fellow’s only way of saying goodbye to him – embracing him was a risk he appeared unwilling to take. With a heavy heart, he watched that stout, resolute man, to whom he would have had to relinquish the role of master if they had ever been stranded on a desert island, clamber back on to the brougham and urge on the horses, leaving only an echo of hoofs as the carriage was swallowed by the fog that spread through the London streets like muddy foam. It struck him as odd that the only person to whom he had said goodbye before killing himself should be the coachman, not his parents or his cousin Charles. Life was full of such ironies.

That was exactly what Harold Barker was thinking as he drove the horses down Dorset Street, looking for the way out of that accursed neighbourhood, where life was not worth thruppence. But for his father’s determination to pluck him from poverty and secure him a job as a coachman, he might have been one more among the hordes of wretched souls scraping an existence in this gangrenous patch of London. Yes, that surly old drunk had hurled him into a series of jobs that had ended at the coach house of the illustrious William Harrington, in whose service he had spent half his life. But they had been peaceful years. He could admit as much when he was taking stock of his life in the early hours after his chores were done and his masters were asleep; peaceful years in which he had taken a wife and fathered two healthy children, one of whom was employed as a gardener by Mr Harrington.

The good fortune that had allowed him to forge a different life from the one he had believed was his lot enabled him now to look upon the wretched souls of Whitechapel with a degree of objectivity and compassion. Harold had been obliged to go to Whitechapel more often than he would have liked when ferrying his master there that terrible autumn eight years ago, a period when even the sky seemed at times to ooze blood. He had read in the newspapers about what had happened in that warren of Godforsaken streets, but also he had seen it reflected in his master’s eyes.

He knew now that the young master had never recovered, that those reckless excursions to pubs and brothels, on which his cousin Charles had dragged them both (Harold had been obliged to remain in the carriage, shivering with cold), had not succeeded in driving the terror from his eyes. And that night young Harrington had appeared ready to lay down his arms, to surrender to an enemy who had proved invincible. Hadn’t that bulge in his pocket looked suspiciously like a firearm? But what could Harold do? Should he turn around and try to stop him? Should a servant step in to alter his master’s destiny?

Harold Barker shook his head. Maybe he was imagining things, he thought, and the young man simply wanted to spend the night in that haunted room, safe with a gun in his pocket.

He left off his uncomfortable broodings when he glimpsed a familiar equipage coming out of the fog towards him. It was the Winslow family carriage, and the bundled-up figure on the box was almost certainly Edward Rush, one of their coachmen. To judge from the way he slowed the horses, Rush appeared to have recognised him, too. Harold nodded a silent greeting to his colleague, before directing his gaze to the occupant of the vehicle. For a split second he and young Charles Winslow stared solemnly at one another. They did not say a word.

‘Faster, Edward,’ Charles ordered his driver, tapping the roof of the carriage with the knob of his cane.

Harold watched with relief as they vanished into the fog in the direction of the Miller’s Court flats. He was not needed now. He only hoped that young Winslow would arrive in time. He would have liked to stay and see how the affair ended, but he had an order to carry out – although he fancied it had been given him by a dead man – so he urged the horses on, and found his way out of that dread neighbourhood where life (I apologise for the repetition, but the same thought occurred to Harold twice) was not worth thruppence.

Admittedly, the expression sums up the area’s peculiarity very accurately, and we probably could not hope for a more profound appraisal from a coachman. However, although his life is worthy of recounting – as are all lives upon close scrutiny – the coachman Barker is not a relevant character in this story. Others may choose to write about it and will no doubt find plenty of material to endow it with the emotion every good story requires – I am thinking of the time he met Rebecca, his wife, or the hilarious incident involving a ferret and a rake – but that is not my purpose here.

And so let us leave Harold – whose reappearance at some point in this tale I cannot vouch for, because a whole host of characters will pass through it and I can’t be expected to remember every one of their faces – and return to Andrew, who at this very moment is crossing the arched entrance to Miller’s Court and walking up the muddy stone path to number thirteen while he rummages in his coat pocket for the key.

After stumbling around in the dark for a time he found the room, and paused before the door in an attitude that anyone seeing him from a neighbouring window would have taken for incongruous reverence. But for Andrew that room was infinitely more than some wretched lair where people who hadn’t a penny to their name took refuge. He had not been back there since that fateful night, although he had paid to keep everything exactly as it had been, exactly as it still was inside his head. Every month for the past eight years he had sent one of his servants to pay the rent, so that nobody could live there: if he ever went back he did not want to find traces of anyone but Marie. The few pennies were to him a drop in the ocean, and Mr McCarthy had been delighted that a wealthy gentleman and obvious rake should want to rent that hovel indefinitely – after what had taken place within its four walls he very much doubted that anybody would be brave enough to sleep there.

Andrew had always known he would come back, that the ceremony he was about to perform could not have been carried out anywhere else.

He opened the door and mournfully cast an eye around the room. It was a tiny space, scarcely more sophisticated than a barn, with flaking walls and a few sticks of battered furniture, including a dilapidated bed, a grimy mirror, a crumbling fireplace and a couple of chairs that might fall apart if a fly landed on them. He felt a renewed sense of amazement that life could take place somewhere like this. Yet had he not known more happiness in this room than in the luxurious Harrington mansion? If, as he had read somewhere, every man’s paradise was in a different place, his was undoubtedly here. He had reached it guided not by a map, charting rivers and valleys, but by kisses and caresses.

And it was a caress, this time an icy one on the nape of his neck, which drew his attention to the fact that nobody had taken the trouble to fix the broken window to the left of the door. What would have been the point? McCarthy belonged to that class of people whose motto was to work as little as possible, and had Andrew reproached him for not replacing the pane he would have argued that, since Mr Harrington had requested everything be kept just as it was, he had assumed that included the window glass. Andrew sighed. He could see nothing with which to plug the hole and decided to kill himself in his hat and coat.

He sat down on one of the rickety chairs, reached into his pocket for the gun and carefully unfolded the cloth, as if he were performing a sacrament. The Colt gleamed in the moonlight that filtered weakly through the small, grimy window.

He stroked the weapon as though it were a cat curled up in his lap and let Marie’s smile wash over him once more. Andrew was always surprised that his memories retained the vibrancy, like fresh roses, of those first days. He remembered everything so vividly, as though no eight-year gap stretched between them, and at times his memories seemed even more beautiful than the real events. What mysterious alchemy could make these imitations appear more vivid than the real thing? The answer was obvious: the passage of time. It transformed the volatile present into a finished, unalterable painting called the past, a canvas that was always executed blindly, with erratic brushstrokes, and only made sense when one stepped far enough away to admire it as a whole.