Читать книгу The Apple - Michel Faber - Страница 6

Clara and the Rat Man

Clara had found the Rat Man repulsive from the outset, but, because she found all of her customers repulsive, this had seemed insufficient reason to spurn his advances. Looking back on it, she regretted her lack of discrimination, and blamed it on her inexperience as a prostitute. In the menagerie of maleness, two kinds of repulsive existed: repulsive-ugly and repulsive-peculiar. The Rat Man was repulsive-peculiar.

Not that he wasn’t ugly, too. His teeth were brown, his eyes were bloodshot, his beard was wispy and his nose was pock-marked. He walked with a limp, and the pinkish-grey skin of his forehead was strangely scarred, as if someone had poured a kettle of scalding water onto his brow when he was a baby. Altogether he would have been a pitiable case, if Clara had been the pitying kind. The world was too undeserving, however, for Clara to give pity away for nothing. Ugly, scarred men were none the less men, and thus despicable.

‘Call me Mr Heaton,’ he’d said, with a formal bow. It was almost comical, him standing there in Great White Lion Street, leaning on his cane, treating her as though she were a prospective pupil of the pianoforte, rather than a whore.

That was six weeks ago. Six weeks was a long time in her new life. Once-cherished illusions and inhibitions were dying almost daily, and, just when she imagined that they must surely all have perished, a few more would fall. Each month, she was unrecognisable as the person she’d been the month before, and the month before that. Even her way of speaking sounded less well-educated, more common now than when she was a servant in a cosy middle-class house, as though the grime of street life had soiled her tongue, coarsening her vowels, nibbling the consonants away. The effort of refraining from saying ‘ain’t’, or of avoiding double negatives, seemed too wearisome now that there was no-one to impress. Only twelve months backwards in time, dressed in stiff calico and clutching an impressive set of silvery keys, she had dealt with tradesmen and bakers’ boys at the back door of her mistress’s house, and had felt herself superior to them as soon as they opened their mouths. The smallest difference in intonation served to define her place above them on the ladder. But she had descended that ladder with dizzying speed.

Yet in another way, she was the stronger for her fall. Every day, she became more skilled and confident at taking the measure of a man in a single glance, and brushing him off if she suspected he was more trouble than he was worth. If the peculiar Mr Heaton had first accosted her yesterday instead of six weeks ago, she would have cold-shouldered him without hesitation. Yes, she was almost sure of that.

But a month and a half ago, she’d still been finding her feet in the profession, and fearful that her fastidious tastes might render her destitute. After all, she wasn’t a fancy woman, kept in a smart house in St John’s Wood. She was a common streetwalker, seeking to earn enough for lodgings and food. What would become of her if she said no to every ugly man who propositioned her?

Mr Heaton had not exactly propositioned her, in any case. He had merely asked her if, for a shilling, she would promise to let one of her fingernails grow.

‘Fingernails grow awful slow, sir,’ she’d said, once she’d got him to repeat the bizarre request. ‘Do you want to stand ’ere watching while it ’appens?’

‘No,’ he’d replied. ‘I’ll meet you here next week at the same time. If you’ve let the nail grow, I shall give you another shilling.’

It seemed absurdly easy money. He specified the nail she was to let grow (middle finger, right hand), she gave him her word, he gave her a shilling, and she watched him limp away. Morning turned to afternoon, afternoon turned to evening, and Clara’s life went along its course. She spent the coin, forgot all about Mr Heaton. She forgot about him so thoroughly that she was loitering in the same spot the following week – and was mortified to see him approaching her once more.

She hoped that she might, by sheer coincidence, have neglected to trim the nail they’d agreed upon. But, when she removed her glove at Mr Heaton’s request, the body part in question was down to the quick.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘I must’ve bit it.’

He looked melancholy, as if this identical circumstance had played itself out many times, with many other women.

‘I’ll give you another chance,’ he said. ‘And another shilling. But this time you must keep your promise.’

‘I surely will, sir,’ she’d pledged.

Her promise proved damned difficult to keep. Although her former life as a lady’s maid was barely a year in the past, she seemed to have lost the knack of keeping in mind, during the routine activities of an average day, any responsibility that was not immediately obvious. Once upon a time, she’d been able to help her mistress plan a dinner party or sew a dress while not forgetting that at precisely five o’clock, she must remind her of some other thing. How extraordinary, to have been so disciplined! Nowadays, she could scarcely remember which services a customer had paid for, and often suspected that a man was helping himself to something extra.

As for this affair with the fingernail, it was torture. Ten, twenty times a day she would find the nail between her lips, just about to be gnawed off by her small white teeth. With a grunt of annoyance she would pull her hand away. Ten, twenty times a day, she would be vaguely, uneasily aware that one of her nails was ill-matched to the other nine, and wonder why. Oh yes: Mr Heaton.

Who would’ve thought that a slightly longer middle fingernail could be such a bother? It was nothing spectacular to look at, perhaps half an inch in extra length. Yet it caught on the fabric of her bodice, dug into the flesh of her neck when she was buttoning up her collar, scratched her cheek when she raised her hand to fiddle with the curls of her fringe. The normally snug fit of her glove was ruined. Half an inch of nail, and it might as well be a beastly talon!

After a day’s work (Clara preferred to do her business during the day and sleep at night) she would retire to her room in Mrs Porter’s lodging-house, and pay Mrs Porter’s maid-of-all-work to fill a bath, and then she would soak in the warm water until her hands went soft and dimpled. And the nail would become pliable, so pliable she could bend it against the tip of her finger. If she were to put it between her teeth, she knew it would tear away without the least resistance, and would taste of nothing at all, and she could swallow it, or spit it out if she wished. She sucked the nail, took it between her teeth the way some men took her nipple, but left it intact. God damn Mr Heaton! How much longer would he plague her?

Each week he came to her at the corner of Great White Lion and Dudley Street, noted approvingly the growth of the nail, and gave her a shilling. Each week she resolved to tell him that she wanted no more shillings from him, that the length of her nail was too inconvenient. Each week she lost her nerve. Mr Heaton was so manifestly pleased with her for obeying him, and Clara couldn’t help feeling a matchstick glow of childish pride at having met his expectations.

Men were not often pleased with Clara. She wasn’t likeable or charming or even especially polite. She offered her body with bad grace, stated her prices matter-of-factly, didn’t pretend to experience transports of joy when some red-faced fool was squirming against her. She scorned compliments; when one of her first customers told her she had the prettiest breasts he’d ever seen, she would probably have slapped him, had she not been attached to him at an awkward angle just then. The honeyed compliments of men always led to a slick of viscous liquid that would soil her clothing and need to be wiped away.

Mr Heaton, however, had not yet laid a hand on her. His shilling was by far the easiest earnings of her week; she got it in thirty seconds flat. Clara wondered if he was a eunuch. His limping gait, the scars on his face … perhaps these were signs of a more serious injury. Clara disliked sick animals and her instincts told her to keep well away from such things. But Jesus Christ almighty: a shilling in thirty seconds, without a hand laid on her! She couldn’t justify rejecting such an offer, especially when other customers wasted hours of her time, haggled over prices, inflicted bruises on her flesh, made her itch. Each time she felt annoyed with Mr Heaton, she reminded herself that she’d had one, two, three, four, five, six shillings from him, for doing nothing. If she kept this lark up for twelve weeks, her accrued capital (ignoring for a moment that she spent each shilling as soon as she got it) would be a pound. A pound just for resisting the impulse to chew a fingernail! That couldn’t be a bad thing, could it?

But then she discovered the catch. Last week, she’d found out something about her crippled benefactor that transformed him from ‘Mr Heaton’ into ‘the Rat Man’.

They met in the street as usual. Passersby squinted in bemusement and distaste as she ungloved her right hand and allowed him to inspect her middle finger. Her nail was ever-so-slightly chipped, where she’d caught it on a brick wall while servicing a customer in a hurry, but it was long, and Mr Heaton nodded in satisfaction.

‘Would you like to earn five shillings at a stroke?’ he asked her, as she was tugging her glove back on.

She regarded him suspiciously. Was he going to ask her to allow four more of her nails to grow? This seemed the most obvious next proposal.

Instead, he said:

‘I want you to accompany me to a sporting event.’

‘I don’t understand much about sport, sir,’ she’d replied.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he assured her. ‘Nobody would expect anything of you. All eyes will be on the action.’

‘Yours too?’

‘Mine too.’

‘Then what use would I be to you, sir?’

He leaned in closer to her, closer than he’d ever ventured before. A respectable, fashionable mother, passing at that moment with her infant daughter toddling along beside, shielded the child’s face and hurried her along the footpath, so shocking was this public display of intimacy. The sparse beard on Mr Heaton’s chin almost brushed the shoulder of Clara’s dress as he spoke low into her ear.

‘The sporting event I have in mind is pit ratting. A publican of my acquaintance hosts a rat pit in Southwark on the last Thursday of every month. The next one is next week.’

‘I don’t like rats, sir.’

‘You don’t have to like rats. They come to a bad end, anyway, and swiftly. Dogs dispatch them with lightning speed.’

‘I don’t like dogs neither, sir.’

He winced, and his expression became somewhat supplicatory.

‘Oh, don’t say that. There will be two dogs there on Thursday. One of them is my own. Robbie is his name. He’s the most beautiful dog; a handsomer dog never walked the earth. His coat is smoother than sable.’

‘I won’t have to do nothing with the dog, I hope, sir?’

‘You can admire his skill. Or not, as you please. Your business will be with me.’

‘And what business will that be, sir?’

‘Nothing you won’t have done before.’

‘I was a respectable woman until this year, sir. There’s many things I’ve never done.’

‘Even so …’ He inclined his head and smiled a weary smile, as if to imply that any whore worth a pinch of salt would have this particular trick in her repertoire.

An alarming thought entered Clara’s head.

‘I won’t have to … do it with you in front of the other people in the public house, will I?’

‘Of course not,’ he said, in gruff exasperation. ‘We will simply watch the rat-catching together. Fully clothed. The only thing I require of you is that you put your hand down the back of my trousers. No one will see it; I’ll wear a long overcoat that will preserve us from prying eyes. Not that there are likely to be any on us. The rat pit is a source of great excitement. You have no idea how wound up people can get.’

Clara stared him straight in the face, which was her usual technique (now that she was a harlot of some experience) with untrustworthy customers. She focused on his pock-marked nose, trying not to be swayed by the feverish, imploring eyes on either side. She made an effort to riffle through his most recent utterances in reverse order, to retrieve the one that concerned her.

‘Down the back of your trousers?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘When the … uh … performance is underway, you are to slip your hand into my clothing. I shan’t be wearing anything under my trousers. You will insert your middle finger into my rectum.’

‘Rectum, sir?’

‘My arse-hole.’

‘And then?’

‘There is no “And then”. That’s all.’ He paused. ‘Five shillings.’

Clara stared at his forehead. It was shiny and seemed to be throbbing, as if the flesh was desperate to sweat but too badly scarred to do so.

‘Blood makes me sick, sir.’

‘There’s scarcely any blood. It’s not like dogfights or cock-fights or bull-baiting. It’s efficient. It’s clean. It’s …’ He clenched his fists, frustrated by her lack of understanding. ‘It’s a privilege to behold it. Awe – that’s what it inspires. Awe. It’s a …’ He took a deep breath; the normal amount of air was not sufficient to convey the grandeur. ‘… an amazing demonstration of what happens when a superbly trained creature is pitted against a horde of vermin.’

She had never heard him sound so passionate. She didn’t care for it.

‘The thing is, next Thursday is quite a full sort of day for me, sir.’

He grabbed her gloved hands, there in the street, and squeezed them inside his own. His eyes were luminous with sincerity.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’ve given you a shilling a week, just to prepare for this. Don’t deny me. Everything depends on you. You’ll be finished in an hour.’

‘You frighten me, sir.’

‘Ten shillings, then.’

Clara swallowed hard.

‘All right,’ she said.

Since then, Clara had put a great deal of thought into how she might renege on her promise without suffering unpleasant consequences.

She considered spending Thursday entirely indoors, ironing her clothes, mending the seam in her camisole, and generally giving her body a rest. But there was no telling what the Rat Man might do if frustrated in this fashion. He might look for her every day afterwards.

She considered brazening it out, telling him she’d had second thoughts, and showing him a middle finger neatly clipped. If he got angry, she could simply call for assistance, couldn’t she? London was crawling with policemen lately, as well as do-gooders of all kinds. Surely one of them would come to her rescue? ‘This man is making indecent propositions to me,’ she could plead. But perhaps this was not a very wise idea after all. She was known by sight to several local policemen. If there was a complaint against her from a gentleman (however ugly or scarred he might be), they would cheerfully throw her in prison.

She considered murdering the Rat Man, just to remove him from her life. But she had to admit that this seemed an excessive response to her fear of embarrassment, more the sort of response one might expect from a man than a woman. Also, she had no means of killing anyone, not even a knife. Was she supposed to strangle Mr Heaton in the street? The whole notion was daft, and she didn’t know why she’d even thought of it, other than the thrill it offered.

She considered fleeing altogether, plying her trade in a different part of the city. Lord Jesus, one little nail grown half an inch, and here she was, planning to wrench herself away from St Giles just as she was getting the hang of it! But this, too, was mere fantasy. Her preferred lodgings were with Mrs Porter in Queen Street and there was a nice public house near the Broad Street junction where she had a growing reputation as a clean girl with not a mark on her. Also there was Dickie’s Chophouse in Seven Dials, where she could eat as much as she wanted, within reason, as long as she never spoke a word to Mr Dickie’s wife.

No, she must keep her appointment with the Rat Man.

Thursday came, and Clara rendezvoused with Mr Heaton in the usual place. Without further discussion, she fell into step with him as he limped briskly along Dudley Street. He was dressed in a voluminous, knee-length overcoat which made him look like an impresario. A down-at-heel impresario, perhaps: the coat was slightly moth-eaten. For the first time it occurred to Clara that her benefactor might not be especially wealthy. Could he ill afford the money he’d been giving her? She felt a twinge of conscience, and dealt with it the only way she knew.

‘I want my ten shillings now,’ she said.

He handed them to her even as they walked. As if he’d been expecting this moment and had the coins already enclosed in his palm.

How would they get to Southwark, she wondered? It must be quite far from here, as none of her prostitute friends knew of it. Did the Rat Man mean to take her on an exhausting march, or would they board an omnibus together, like husband and wife? She didn’t like the idea of hordes of strangers presuming that there must be an intimate relationship between herself and the Rat Man; she wished she’d fobbed him off with a simple fuck six weeks ago, instead of getting herself mixed up in this malarkey.

‘Is it far?’ she said.

His arm jerked into the air, and she flinched in fear of being struck, but he was only hailing a cab.

‘The Traveller’s Rest, Southwark,’ he said.

‘Very good, sir,’ said the cabbie. ‘Going for the special keg they keeps downstairs, are you sir?’

‘Indeed.’

‘I’m partial to a bit of that meself, sir. Very tasty.’

Clara and Mr Heaton climbed into the cabin. Mr Heaton seemed not at all surprised that the cabbie knew the reputation of The Traveller’s Rest. For a moment, Clara caught a glimpse of a London which was vastly richer in attractions than she and her cronies had any notion of, and which other folk made it their business to explore. It was not a picture she had any desire to see. Indeed, the Rat Man seemed to specialise in showing her glimpses of things she would prefer to remain ignorant of.

‘How will I get home when it’s over?’

The Rat Man smiled sadly. ‘I trust we’ll both agree when it’s over.’

‘But you don’t live where I live.’

‘I’ll take you home first.’

Clara nodded, unconvinced. If she’d learned anything since her fall into prostitution, it was not to rely on the courtesy and generosity of others. The cab seemed to be travelling a very long way, and every clack of the horse’s hooves on the cobbles emphasised that she was farther and farther from the streets she knew. The ten shillings stowed in the pocket of her dress would do her no good if she was robbed and left for dead in a dark unfamiliar neighbourhood. To prevent that happening, she was now under pressure to remain on good terms with the Rat Man, to please him or at least not quarrel with him. She didn’t know if it was possible for them to spend a whole afternoon together, especially one involving rats and dogs, without quarrelling.

‘I hope we have understood each other about the nail,’ he said, his face turned away from her in the shadowy cabin.

‘The nail, sir?’

‘You mustn’t be gentle with it, you understand? You must push it as deep inside as your finger will go.’

‘I’ll do me best, sir.’

‘You needn’t worry about hurting me.’

‘I won’t, sir.’

‘And don’t pull it out until …’ He turned even more sharply away from her, as though he had just spotted someone of his acquaintance passing by in the street. ‘Until it’s over.’

‘How can I be sure of that, sir?’

He turned to face her then. His mouth was set hard. The scarred flesh on his face was pale, while his cheeks were flushed and mottled.

‘The last rat will be dead,’ he said.

The Traveller’s Rest was on the other side of the world. The cab had to cross the Thames to get there, past Waterloo, where Clara had been once or twice with her mistress, and then farther still. The pub itself, when they finally reached it, hardly seemed to warrant the length of the journey. It impressed Clara as a low sort of establishment, the kind where shiftless men drank with serious intent. The atmosphere was brewed thick with pipe smoke and alcohol fumes, and the regulars hunched low as if to take the occasional breath of oxygen from somewhere under the tables. A patch of floor where the floorboards had rotted away was crudely mended with planks of a different colour, the jagged edges covered over with tar. The fireplace was choked with ash and amber embers. Several of the gaslights were turned off or had ceased to function, and the scarcity of glass in the room meant that it wholly lacked the mirrored conviviality of the pubs Clara frequented. Instead, dark brown wood stole the light and refused to give it back.

‘I don’t like it here,’ she whispered to her companion.

‘This isn’t what we’ve come for,’ he whispered back. ‘What we’ve come for is downstairs.’

Clara couldn’t see any stairs. She craned her head around a pillar, and saw only more half-sozzled men staring back at her from their drinking stations. She had expected a bright, theatrical-looking banner hung up to generate excitement about the impending rat fight, but there was nothing of the sort. Indeed there was scant decoration on the walls – just a few curling handbills advertising recently bygone entertainments in more salubrious-sounding establishments than The Traveller’s Rest. There was also a hand-lettered notice saying ‘BEWARE OF SODS’.

Mr Heaton walked up to the publican. They nodded at each other without a word, shook hands … or perhaps a coin was being passed from one man to the other. Then the publican, Mr Heaton and Clara passed through the room to the very rear, where the publican pulled open a trap-door in the floor. A flight of stairs was revealed, illuminated by a light of unclear origin. The tobacco vapours of the room below met those of the room above, and swirled into each other.

The cellar, when Clara had allowed herself to be led down the stairs, was really not such a dismal place. In fact, it suited her better. Despite its subterranean location, it seemed less claustrophobic than the drinking den upstairs, and was much better lit, with a dozen oil lamps at strategic points. The rough stone walls were painted white, to enhance the illumination.

The cellar was mainly given over to the rat pit. There were several rows of wooden seats pushed against the rough stone walls, but no-one was sitting in them. All the spectators – some twenty in all – stood around the edge of the pit, which was more like a raised wooden tub. It was octagonal, waist-high, and about nine feet in diameter. The publican made his way over to a barrel almost as tall as himself, a barrel made for flour rather than wine or beer, to whose lid he laid his ear. Not quite satisfied, he peered into one of several holes drilled in the lid, squinting clownishly.

‘Seventy-five of the best in there,’ said a man wearing a top hat without any top on it.

‘We could use a hundred,’ said the publican.

‘A nundred of these beauties takes more than one man to catch.’

‘You used to catch a hundred for us.’

‘That was before himprovements in sanitation.’

‘Well, I hope these are big ones.’

‘Big? Comb their fur a different way and they could pass as ferrets.’

Mr Heaton laid a finger against Clara’s upper arm to get her attention.

‘I’m going to fetch Robbie now,’ he murmured near her ear. ‘Things will move fast from here on in. Remember what I’ve asked of you.’

She nodded.

‘Take your glove off, then,’ he reminded her.

She looked down at her hands, self-conscious at the idea of removing her gloves in a public place: everyone would instantly assume she was a woman of low breeding. But then she realised she was the sole female in the cellar, and that each man must surely already have judged her to be a whore. She pulled off her gloves, finger by finger, and no-one took a blind bit of notice. She could have thrown her skirts over her head, and still the assembled spectators might have kept their attention squarely on the business at hand. Some of the men were already leaning their elbows on the rim of the rat-pit, jostling shoulder-to-shoulder. Clara wondered how it was decided who should lean on the rim of the pit and who should goggle over their shoulders; did it depend on how much they’d paid for admission? Several of the customers were rather handsomely dressed, with shiny buttons on their coats, immaculate hats, fashionable cravats that cost fifty times more than the grubby cotton scarf worn by the rat-catcher. Clara doubted these gentlemen would ever set foot in a place like The Traveller’s Rest, were it not for the scuffling, squeaking contents of the keg.

‘All right, gentlemen,’ announced the publican when Mr Heaton had disappeared into an anteroom beyond the cellar. ‘We have two dogs this afternoon, Robbie and Lopsy-Lou. Less rats than we might’ve hoped. How shall we divvy up the day’s proceedings?’

This provoked a roisterous babble of bets and disputation.

‘A shilling on Robbie to kill five in fifteen seconds!’

‘Two shillings on Lopsy-Lou to kill twenty in fifty seconds!’

‘Here’s a shilling says twelve of twenty’s still kicking after half a minute!’

‘If we’ve only got seventy-five rats, it should be three matches of twenty-five each.’

‘That muddles everything!’

‘Twenty is a good number.’

‘It don’t go into seventy-five.’

‘All my bets is calculated on twenty.’

‘We know all about your bets. You expect to see blood for sixpence.’

‘We can’t have three matches with only two dogs.’

‘’Course we can. Best of three.’

‘Put out thirty-seven rats each match, and god damn the one left over!’

‘Lopsy-Lou is heavier than Robbie; she should have a handicap. I say Robbie kills ten for Lopsy’s fifteen.’

‘Why should a Manchester terrier have it easier than a London one?’

‘Let’s weigh the dogs! Each kills as many rats as he weighs in pounds. The dog that kills his quota quickest is the winner.’

‘I don’t see no scales.’

‘A public house with no scales?’

‘Keep the times and rats the same number, but give Robbie smaller rats!’

‘What bollocks! If he can’t kill his share, he shouldn’t be here!’

‘Why not set a fixed time – half a minute, say – and see which dog kills the most?’

‘I won’t bet dog against dog. It should be dog against rat.’

‘Anyway, what would you do after the thirty seconds was up, and there was still rats alive?’

‘Pull the dog out of the pit, of course.’

‘That’s cruel!’

‘Gentlemen!’ barked the publican. ‘We must begin. Let’s have twenty in the pit for Robbie and see how the first match pleases you.’

This seemed to satisfy the majority, and the bets were swiftly laid, and the money collected. During this process, Mr Heaton emerged from the shadows, holding his dog by a leash, very close to its collar. It was indeed a beautiful dog, a silky black animal, somewhat smaller than Clara had anticipated. It was placid, standing patiently at its master’s side, looking up at him for approval – until the publican opened the lid of the barrel and started doling rats into the pit. Then Robbie reared up, lunging against the leash, and Mr Heaton had to pull him hard against his thigh.

The publican worked swiftly but carefully. Using a pair of metal tongs designed for removing buns from an oven, he selected the squirming rodents one by one from the keg, and deposited them gently into the pit. The rats (a little various in size, which caused mutters of complaint among the spectators) seemed healthy specimens of their kind, as sleek as kittens and as nimble as cockroaches. They immediately attempted to scuttle to freedom, but the sides of the pit were smooth, and the pit’s rim had a lip of metal screwed onto it for extra security. The sound of tiny claws scrabbling against polished wood was marvellously distinctive. The way the rats slid back down to the chalk-whitened floor was comical. Clara licked her lips.

Mr Heaton made his way, with some difficulty, to her side. His limp was one problem, the barely suppressed frenzy of poor Robbie another. The dog was making little whining sounds, deep in its throat – plaintive whore noises. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen rats had been doled out into the pit. Mr Heaton stood close to Clara, his hip almost touching her waist. The unscarred parts of his face were shiny with sweat, and the muscles in his neck were bulging, a phenomenon with which Clara, in her new profession, had become increasingly familiar. The moment was almost nigh.

At the drop of the twentieth rat into the ring, a tall man with a stopwatch started a short countdown to Robbie’s release. Those five seconds were the longest Clara had ever endured.

The instant the dog’s collar was unfastened, he shot into the pit and began killing rats. Contrary to Clara’s expectations, he didn’t chase them round and round the enclosure, feinting and dodging and hesitating like a cat with a mouse. He killed with the efficiency of a machine. The rats swarmed helplessly to and fro, clustering together in corners of the octagonal arena, or dashing across to the opposite side. The dog didn’t waste time chasing individuals. He pounced on groups, picking off the rat nearest him, dispatching the squealing creature with a single bite. One snap of his jaws seemed enough. He didn’t bother even to give his kill a triumphal shake, but merely let it drop to the floor as soon as his teeth had stabbed through the soft flesh.

With a dawning thrill of admiration, Clara realised there was more to the dog’s performance than random brutality: he paced his exertions with extraordinary cunning, pausing for a half a second here and there to allow stray rats to huddle together again, stamping one paw on the ground to dissuade a rat from running the wrong way. His eyes were bright with a fierce intelligence. There was something weirdly benign about his murderousness; he treated each rat the same, neglected none. He killed with a conscience, clearly aware of the bets placed upon him, the high hopes of his master.

Twelve rats dead, thirteen, fourteen. Mr Heaton was hard up against Clara, his arm nudging hers. The cellar was delirious with desperate noises: heavy breathing, the squeals and skitterings of doomed rats, the taloned patter of dog feet, hoarse cries of ‘Yes!’ and ‘There!’

It was over all too soon. Robbie lunged at the last rat, broke its back with a snap of his jaws. A great cheer went up, and the time-keeper punched his fist in the air. Clara gasped, slumped against the rim of the rat pit, whose metal surface she found she was gripping with both hands.

The aftermath was messy. Not because of blood or saliva (Robbie had been remarkably clean) but because there was disagreement among the spectators over the deadness of some of the rats. A forlorn specimen was fished from the ring and laid on the floor at the men’s feet. One man alleged that the creature only had its back broken, rendering it immobile, but that it was still alive: he had seen it choke for breath. Another man stamped on the rat’s tail, arguing that if it had any life left in it, the pain would surely summon up some reaction. There was none. A second contentious rat was retrieved from the arena, having allegedly been spotted breathing. Although limp and unconscious, it seemed to be very much alive; its abdomen was palpating visibly. Two of the men who had bet against Robbie insisted that he’d failed to kill his quota. Another man proposed that the match be resumed just for a few seconds, to allow Robbie to kill this last rat in whatever time it took – to which the two dissenters objected that it would obviously take the dog only half a second to kill a rat which was insensible, but that he ought to’ve done the job properly the first time. The rat-catcher, who had been regarding the creature philosophically all this while, suddenly bent down and slit open the rat’s belly with a knife. A grisly sight was revealed: a tangle of foetal sacs, shiny as sausages, each containing a squirming baby rat, fully-furred and almost ready for life.

‘’Ave we got a puppy wants to learn a trade?’ quipped the rat-catcher, and the good spirits of the company were restored.

With one exception. Mr Heaton left The Traveller’s Rest before Lopsy-Lou even had her chance to perform. He pleaded a stomach upset, and indeed he did look ghastly, his face a mixture of bone-white and beefsteak red. His fellow sportsmen protested that he must stay: Robbie was a champion and would surely be given a third match after Lopsy-Lou had done her dash. Lopsy-Lou’s owner hinted that Mr Heaton’s sudden illness might indicate a greater regard for his already-pocketed winnings than for the inherent value of watching two noble dogs compete. But Mr Heaton was not to be persuaded. His digestion, he insisted, was very bad. He shouldn’t be a bit surprised if he was in bed within the hour.

Without speaking to each other, Mr Heaton and Clara walked side-by-side out of the pub. Mr Heaton hailed a cab at once, and for a moment Clara was afraid he would leave her standing on the footpath while he sped away. But he opened the cabin door for her, with stony-faced courtesy, and waited for her to climb in.

‘You broke your promise,’ he said, as soon as they were seated and the vehicle was in motion.

‘I forgot, sir,’ she said.

‘I reminded you,’ he said. ‘Twice.’

‘I couldn’t take my eyes off the dog and the rats, sir. It was my first time.’

He sighed deeply, and looked out the window. Night was falling. Shopworkers were hurrying home. A lamplighter was doing what seemed like callisthenics, stretching his back and arms in preparation for the task ahead.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Clara. She surmised that Mr Heaton was too much of a gentleman to demand his ten shillings back, but thought it was just as well to show contrition, so that he might take pity on her.

‘What’s done is done,’ he said, in a tone of bitter melancholy. He seemed to be retreating into a world of his own, a place where he alone could go. Clara found this more discomfiting than if he had loudly chastised her in the street.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said again, peeking surreptitiously at whether he was softening towards her. He appeared not to have heard.

The cab joined the traffic bound for Westminster, rattled across the bridge, passed the houses of Parliament. The tall buildings blocked out the sun, bringing on the night all the quicker. Mr Heaton unfastened his overcoat, unbuttoned the coat he wore underneath, and pulled out a tobacco tin from an inside pocket. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it. Inhaling for what seemed like a very long time, he tilted his head back against the back wall of the cabin. It was then that Clara saw the deep scar on his neck, just under his beard-line, running almost from earlobe to earlobe. The scar was perfectly semicircular in shape, except for a hiccup caused by the Adam’s apple. It was punctuated all around by other scars: cross-shaped white dots where someone had crudely stitched the gaping flesh back together. The dots looked as if buttons had once been sewn there and fallen off unnoticed.

‘What happened to you, sir?’ Clara asked.

He exhaled smoke until it hung around his head like a fog. He stared up at the ceiling, blinking his gleaming, bloodshot eyes.

‘Happened?’ he murmured absently.

‘Someone hurt you, sir.’ She pointed at his neck, almost touching him. He smiled but didn’t respond.

‘Was it robbers, sir?’

Again he smiled. ‘You might say that.’ He took the deepest possible puff of his cigarette, making it glow fierce in the dimness of the cabin.

The hansom rattled on. Through the window on her side, Clara saw a landmark she recognised from that lost period of her life when she used to meet with another lady’s maid called Sinead at a tea-room near Charing Cross Station. She knew where she was now, more or less. It wouldn’t be very long before they were back in St Giles, so she started rehearsing what her parting words to Mr Heaton ought to be, whether she should affect a breezy tone or a solemn one; whether a third apology might melt him or whether she’d milked contrition for as much as it was worth; whether she ought to suggest that they attempt to do this again next month, despite her honest intention never to clap eyes on him again. Just when she was deep in thought, debating the wisdom of perhaps giving him some sort of kiss on the cheek the instant before sprinting to her freedom, he spoke again.

‘I was in the Battle of Peiwar Kotal.’

‘How terrible, sir. Was that in India?’

‘Afghanistan.’

Clara had never heard of the place. Admittedly her schooling had been scant and she’d entered into service almost immediately afterward, and her mistress, for all her wealth, knew nothing about anything. Clara strained to recall if Mr William Rackham, her mistress’s husband, had ever uttered any informative pronouncements about Afghanistan in her earshot. But thinking of the pompous windbag who’d dismissed her with a damning letter of reference – a letter of reference so poisonous that she’d spent more than three years trying to get decent employment with it, only to be driven to her current line of work – made her deaf, dumb and blind with anger.

‘I don’t know much about history, sir,’ she said.

He flicked his cigarette out of the window. ‘It was last year, actually.’ Turning his face close to hers, he examined her features as though evaluating, for the first time, her desirability as a woman. ‘You think I’m an old man, don’t you? I’m younger than you are, I’ll wager.’

‘I wouldn’t wager against you, sir.’

He broke off his gaze and slumped back in his seat. His melancholy pout and wispy beard struck her, all of a sudden, as boyish. He was fine-boned and slender, after all. Whatever he’d endured in battle had added ten, twenty, thirty years onto his age.

‘How did the war start, sir?’

He chuckled, an ugly sound. ‘The leader of the Afghans, Shere Ali, made friends with a Russian gentleman. Our government decided that this friendship was not in the interests of our empire. So several thousand men, including myself, marched from India to Afghanistan. When we reached the Peiwar Pass, we were met with an army of eighteen thousand Afghans.’

‘Oh, heavens, sir: what a terrible defeat you suffered.’

He laughed again. ‘Defeat? On the contrary: we won. That is, Her Majesty’s army won. I, personally, did not win. As you can see.’

Clara chewed her lower lip, feeling wretchedly out of her depth.

‘It’s awful, sir. We should all be thankful to you, sir, for the victory.’

He was rummaging in his clothing for the tobacco tin. ‘It’s a little too soon to celebrate, I’m afraid,’ he said, as he began to construct another cigarette. ‘The war goes on.’

‘Goes on, sir?’

‘I was wounded in a battle. The war goes on. Only a month ago, we lost hundreds of men in a disastrous defeat in Maiwand.’

Clara was silent. If there was a lesson to be learned from this fiasco, it was never to participate in conversations she could not hope to keep her place in. While Mr Heaton made short work of his cigarette, Clara simmered with frustration; she wished she could somehow make him understand that she had suffered, too. She wanted to tell him all about her unfair dismissal, and the many humiliations that had preceded it, and the insults she had endured after it, and, most of all, the indignities she had been forced to undergo at the hands of those swinish, repulsive creatures, the men who used whores. She held her tongue.

Familiar lights were glowing in the distance. Night had descended entirely, and the temperature in the cabin had become chilly. Clara became aware that her hands were still bare. She fetched her gloves out of the pocket of her dress, taking great care not to jingle the coins in there. But in attempting to put her right glove on, she discovered that the nail of her middle finger was impeding progress more than usual: it was jagged, shaped like the edge of a specialised cutting-tool. She must have gripped the rim of the rat pit harder than she remembered.

An unexpected voice – her own – piped up in the dark.

‘My nail is broken, sir. But it’s still quite long. And very sharp. Do you want to feel it, sir?’

She put her hand into the murky space between them and he took it. She dug her fingernail into his palm, to demonstrate its potentials.

‘Shall I, sir?’

He wrapped her finger in his hand, holding it gently.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Not now.’