‘HAZCHEM,’ he said, putting a Hebraic spin on it. He went back to the other side of Surrey Street and up to the Strand where he watched a 91 doubledecker, magisterial in its redness, westering with the lesser traffic. He looked eastward to the spire of St Clement Danes sharp against the autumnal afternoon, westward to the church of St Mary-le-Strand in the valedictory gold of the declining sun. ‘De Schimmel,’ he said as a remembered image surfaced. ‘The Grey.’ It was a picture he’d seen at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Philips Wouverman. In the foreground was a path ascending a hill with a background of cloudy sky. A rider had dismounted and was holding the reins of his horse while he peered past a gnarled tree-trunk that ended eight or nine feet from the ground. Bare shoots grew out of this tall stump that stood at the left-hand edge of the picture; what the rider was looking at could not be seen. On the right-hand side were visible the head and shoulders of a second man coming up the curving path behind the rider. ‘That second man,’ said Klein, ‘is he mounted or on foot? Has the man with the horse seen him? What’s that one looking at beyond the edge of the picture? I’m not sure he should have got off his horse.’
‘What horse?’ said a man who now stood facing him and breathing alcoholic fumes on him. He was tall and shabby with a peaked cap at the top of him; he was dirty and long unshaven, looked as if he’d been sleeping rough.
‘Sorry,’ said Klein, ‘I was just talking to myself.’
‘What’s the name of that horse?’
‘De Schimmel.’
‘Pah! No good.’ He wagged a dirty finger. ‘Don’t put your money on De Schimmel.’
‘Why not?’
‘Never bet on a Jewish horse.’
‘Why not?’
‘They think too much.’
‘How do you know De Schimmel’s Jewish?’
‘Because he thinks too much. At the off he’ll be thinking how to invest his winnings while the other horses are already out of the gate and halfway round the track. You Jewish?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘You are — I can tell. So was Jesus, and look what happened to him. Can you spare ten quid or so? I need to get drunk.’
‘No.’
‘Give me the money you were going to put on De Schimmel.’
‘I wasn’t going to put any money on him.’
‘Won’t even back one of your own! Pah! Bad cess to you.’ He lurched away.
‘“Bad cess”!’ said Klein. ‘I’ve only ever read that — I didn’t think anyone said it any more.’
It was a little after four when he turned and went back down Surrey Street towards Temple Place and the river, towards the glittering sunpoints and the boats moving and still. He was walking on the Norfolk Hotel side, and when he reached Temple Place he saw, in the middle distance to his right, Waterloo Bridge between him and the setting sun. ‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when there was no bridge. There was a time when there was nothing except the river.’
On his way along Temple Place to the tube station he paused at the Victoria Embankment Gardens sign and went up the steps to the paved and balustraded area overlooking the river. He’d never been there before. To the right and left below him were the trees that had not been visible from Temple Place. There was a man sitting on one of the benches, no one else. ‘They’re going to refurbish this and make it a tourist attraction,’ he told Klein, ‘with a fountain in the centre, I believe.’
‘Tables and chairs and umbrellas?’ said Klein.
‘Probably.’
‘That’s too bad, really.’
‘It is. This is a quiet place — the way it is now it’s nice to come here and sit for a while.’
‘Most changes are for the worse.’
‘I think you’re right.’
Klein went to the balustrade and looked out over the Embankment where the early rush-hour traffic east and west made a continuous blur of noise in which the white eyes of headlamps and the red eyes of taillamps came and went. Still gold and silver under the darkening sky, the river was garlanded with lights on both sides. On the water bright pleasure boats with their music and working craft without moved up and downriver, the beat of their engines calling to the shorebound. ‘So elegiac,’ said Klein, ‘so full of departure and farewell. Shining waters hung with lamps; gold and silver on the river and a goodbye look.’
At the station he went into the Temple Bar Restaurant for coffee and a bun. He sat there for a while, whispering his thoughts with his hand over his mouth. Then he went out, walked past those waiting to meet someone, past the Big Issue man to the edge of the traffic on the Embankment. Across the river the word OXO, spelled vertically on the side of a building, glowed palindromically in red neon. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I know.’
In the station a black cleaning woman wearing an orange London Transport hi-vi vest was singing to herself. It sounded like a Bach cantata. ‘There you have it,’ said Klein, and went home.
18 Halcyon Days
‘It was a two-masted schooner being built in a back yard,’ said Klein to himself, ‘close by the railroad station at Ambler. Not all that big — I think it was only thirty-six feet. I passed it every day when I was commuting to art school in Philadelphia. I kept wondering about it until one day on the way home I got off the train and introduced myself to the man who was building it: Harley Davidson, his name was — no relation to the motorbike. He seemed old to me at the time; I suppose he might have been between fifty and sixty, a freelance inventor who used safety pins where he lacked buttons and kept his trousers up with a piece of string. The name of the boat was Halcyon Days and Davidson and his son were building it from the William Hand Tornado design. They intended to sail around the world. That was back in ‘41 or ‘42. When I was drafted in 1943 the Halcyon Days was still up on stocks in the Davidson back yard. When I got out of the army in 1945 I went to New York and never saw the boat again. I wonder if they ever made the trip. Davidson showed Jim and me the moon through his telescope one evening; it looked like a mouldy orange.’
For his meeting with Angelica Klein put some necessaries in a shoulder bag: M.R. James to re-read on the Underground; reading glasses; hearing glasses (a microphone in each ear-piece); notebook and spare pen; sugar cubes in case of a hypoglycaemic reaction; glyceryl trinitrate for angina; tissues; Sony microcassette with spare batteries and cassette; Olympus point-and-shoot loaded with Fuji 1600; Swiss Army knife; Mini-Mag torch. ‘Why the torch?’ Klein asked himself.
Monday evening, 21.00: on the platform at Fulham Broadway the yellow light was sickly. Five or six people murmured or shouted into their mobile phones; others embraced what silence remained. The wincing of the rails announced the arrival of a Tower Hill train and when the doors opened the platform emptied into the carriages. When he sat down Klein wrote in his notebook, ‘This seems a very tired train, worn out after a hard rush hour. The aisles are choked with crumpled newspapers; there’s barely enough open space for the beer and soft-drink empties to roll around in. Twenty-three people in this carriage: twenty-three Its or just one It for the lot. No, there has to be one for each person, otherwise there’d be Itlock. Twenty-two inner voices, all of them presumably saying different things. Twenty-three destinies, coiled like intestines in each of us? Or not. Twenty-three continua to where?’