Читать книгу Burning Bright - Tracy Chevalier - Страница 16

In the two weeks they’d been in Lambeth, the Kellaways had not gone much beyond the streets immediately surrounding their house. They did not need to – all the shops and stalls they needed were on Lambeth Terrace by Lambeth Green, on Westminster Bridge Road, or on the Lower Marsh. Jem had been with his father to the timber yards by the river near Westminster Bridge; Maisie had gone with her mother to St George’s Fields to see about laying out their clothes there to dry. When Jem suggested that they go for a walk on Easter Monday across Westminster Bridge to see Westminster Abbey, all were keen. They were used to walking a great deal in the Piddle Valley, and found it strange not to be so active in Lambeth.

They set out at one o’clock, when others were eating or sleeping or at the pub. ‘How shall we go, then?’ Maisie asked Jem, knowing better than to direct the question at her parents. Anne Kellaway was clutching onto her husband’s arm as if a strong wind were about to blow her away. Thomas Kellaway was smiling as usual and gazing about him, looking like a simpleton waiting to go wherever was chosen for him.

‘Let’s take a short cut to the river and walk along it up to the bridge,’ Jem said, knowing it had fallen to him to lead them, for he was the only Kellaway who had begun to become familiar with the streets.

‘Not the short cut that girl talked of, is’t?’ Anne Kellaway said. ‘I don’t want to be going along any place called Cut-Throat Lane.’

‘Not that one, Ma,’ Jem lied, reasoning that it would take her a long time to work out that it was indeed Cut-Throat Lane. Jem had found it soon after Maggie told them about it. He knew his family would like the lane because it ran through empty fields; if you turned your back to the houses and didn’t look too far ahead to Lambeth Palace or to the warehouses by the river, you could more or less think you were in the countryside. One day Jem would find the direction he needed to walk that would take him into countryside proper. Perhaps Maggie would know the way.

For now, he led his family up past Carlisle House, a nearby mansion, to Royal Row and along it to Cut-Throat Lane. It was very quiet there, with no one in the lane; and, it being a holiday, few were out working in the vegetable gardens that dotted the field. Jem was thankful too that it was sunny and clear. So often in Lambeth the sky was not blue, even on a sunny day, but thick and yellow with smoke from coal fires, and from the breweries and manufactories for vinegar and cloth and soap that had sprung up along the river. Yesterday and today, however, those places were shut, and because it was warm, many had not lit fires. Jem gazed up into the proper deep blue he knew well from Dorsetshire, coupled with the vivid green of the roadside grass and shrubs, and found himself smiling at these colours that were so natural and yet shouted louder than any London ribbon or dress. He began to walk more slowly, at a saunter rather than the quick, nervous pace he’d adopted since coming to Lambeth. Maisie paused to pick a few primroses for a posy. Even Anne Kellaway stopped clutching her husband and swung her arms. Thomas Kellaway began to whistle Over the Hills and Far Away, a song he often hummed when he was working.

Too soon the lane made a sharp right and skirted along the edges of the gardens surrounding Lambeth Palace. When they reached the river their short idyll ended. In front of them stood a series of dilapidated warehouses, flanked by rows of workmen’s cottages. The warehouses were shut today, which added to their menacing atmosphere; normally the bustling action of the work made them more welcoming. Anne Kellaway took her husband’s arm again.

Though Jem and Thomas Kellaway had been down to the Thames to buy wood and have it cut at the timber yards, the female Kellaways had only seen it briefly when they first arrived at Astley’s Amphitheatre, and had not really taken it in. Now they had unwittingly chosen an unimpressive moment in which to get their first good look at the great London river. The tide was out, reducing the water to a thin murky ribbon running through a wide, flat channel of grey silt that reminded Anne Kellaway of an unmade bed. Granted, even in its reduced state it was twenty times bigger than the Piddle, the river that ran alongside the Kellaways’ garden in Piddletrenthide. Despite its small size, though, the Piddle still had the qualities Anne Kellaway looked for in a river – purposeful, relentless, cheerful and cleansing, its sound a constant reminder of the world’s movement.

The Thames was nothing like that. To Anne Kellaway it seemed not a river, but a long intestine that twisted each way out of sight. It did not have clear banks, either. The bed slid up towards the road, awash with pebbles and sludge, and it was easy enough to step straight from the road down into it. Despite the mud, children had done just that, and were running about in the riverbed, some playing, some picking out objects that had been left exposed by the low tide: shoes, bottles, bits of waterlogged wood and cloth, the head of a doll, a broken bowl.

The Kellaways stood and watched. ‘Look how dirty they’re getting,’ Maisie said as if she envied them.

‘Hideous place,’ Anne Kellaway stated.

‘It looks better when the tide’s in, like it were when we first arrived.’ Jem felt he had to defend the river, as if it were the embodiment of London and his family’s decision to move there.

‘Funny it has a tide,’ Maisie said. ‘I know our Piddle runs down to the sea somewhere, but it still always runs the same way. I’d feel topsy-turvy if it changed directions!’

‘Let’s go to the bridge,’ Jem suggested. They began to step more quickly now, past the warehouses and the workmen’s cottages. Some of the workers and their wives and children were sitting out in front of their houses, talking, smoking and singing. Most of them fell silent as the Kellaways passed, except for a man playing a pipe, who played faster. Jem wanted to step up their pace even more, but Maisie slowed down. ‘He’s playing Tom Bowling,’ she said. ‘Listen!’ She smiled at the man; he broke off playing and smiled back.

Anne Kellaway stiffened, then pulled at her daughter’s arm. ‘Come along, Maisie!’

Maisie shook free and stood still in the middle of the road to join in singing the last verse in a high, clear voice:

Yet shall poor Tom find pleasant weather,

When He, who all commands,

Shall give, to call life’s crew together,

The word to pipe all hands:

Thus death, who Kings and tars dispatches,

In vain Tom’s life has doffed,

For though his body’s under hatches,

His soul has gone aloft,

His soul has gone aloft.

She and the pipe player finished together, and there was a small silence. Ann Kellaway stifled a sob. Tommy and Maisie used to sing the song together in beautiful harmony.

‘It be all right, Ma,’ Maisie said. ‘We has to sing it still, for we don’t want to forget Tommy, do we?’ She bobbed at the man and said, ‘Thank’ee, sir. Ar’ernoon.’