Her ploy had succeeded in getting rid of him but when she got to work she was still shaking with anger. She realized that very little had changed so far as Stuart and she were concerned. She still hated him profoundly. She still wanted to hurt him, to see him suffer. He had always made her feel weak and impotent, and the ways of hurting him seemed so few. Maybe she could have told his wife about their affair, yet she suspected that the cold, business-like Anita would have taken it in her stride, shrugged and got on with making a few work calls.
She’d much rather have punched him with her bare fists, broken a few teeth and bones, smashed his nose open, left him in the gutter, cut and bruised and splitting blood. It was a nice thought, but she knew she was no good at that kind of thing. However, as she unlocked the doors of the London Particular and opened for the day, a blindingly obvious realization came to her: she had just slept with a man who was very good indeed at that kind of thing.
PEPYS
As he walked, Stuart felt increasingly that he belonged to London, but he never made the ridiculous mistake of believing that London belonged to him. London is not Shakespeare’s or Dickens’ or Dr Johnson’s. It belongs to everybody and to nobody, to the tourists and out-of-towners no less than to the natives. The racist tells the object of his hatred to get back where he belongs, Bombay not the Isle of Dogs. History may leave its stamp but it can’t make claims to ownership. Was it only because he started keeping a diary that Stuart time and again felt the enduring presence of Samuel Pepys?
It was Pepys’ eye for detail that he loved, that he wished he could emulate in his own diary. As the Great Fire rages and the houses burn, Pepys watches the pigeons on the windowsills of the houses, loath to leave their homes, waiting until it’s too late, until their feathers catch fire and the birds tumble into space flapping their now useless wings. Yes, Pepys was there and he simply recorded what he saw, but it took a certain talent to be aware enough to see these things. Sometimes Stuart thought he had this talent, sometimes not, but he knew he wanted it.
As he walked through London he saw St Margaret’s Church where Pepys was married, the Gatehouse prison at Westminster Abbey where he was incarcerated. There was Salisbury Court where he was born, St Bride’s Church where he was christened, in a font that still survives. There were the Gray’s Inn gardens where he walked the same paths that Bacon and Raleigh had walked before him. When Stuart saw Hyde Park he was reminded that this was where Pepys went to show off his new carriage and his new wife.
Above all there was Pepys Street with the house which he lived in while working at the Navy Office and while writing most of his diary. And in the same street there was St Olave’s Church in whose crypt he and his wife are buried. Elizabeth Pepys died young, and inside the church Pepys placed a marble bust of her that he could gaze at during sermons. Stuart wondered whether some churchmen would find that idolatrous. He also found it a seriously odd thing for any husband to do. If Anita died would he really want her marble effigy staring down at him? No, and yet he would surely keep photographs of her, the way he still kept a photograph of Judy, though that of course was well hidden.
There were other occasions when Stuart’s own history became conflated with Pepys’, with the history of London itself. His walking took him to the City, to Pudding Lane, the source of the Fire, and the very moment he entered the street and looked up at the Monument, two fire engines hurtled along the street, sirens raging, scattering traffic and pedestrians.
He became enamoured with Pepys’ motto Mens cujusque est quisque, “A man is as his mind is’, and wanted to use it as his own. He began to see London through Pepys’ eyes, foiling eyes at that. But it didn’t matter, for it seemed to Stuart that Pepys had created a perfect, mythical city; a city of words.
Stuart hoped his diary could be a fraction as worthy as Pepys’, but sometimes he felt disadvantaged. It was frequently said that the end of the twentieth century was a strange time to be living, yet Stuart knew it couldn’t compete with Pepys’ days. You might say that these were plague years, but Aids had nothing on the Great Plague of 1665. And again, it was frequently said that the major cities of the world were in danger of destroying themselves, but it was tame stuff compared to the destructive frenzy of the Fire of London.
Stuart had the not uncommon sense that he was living a life that was simultaneously grotesque yet bland, cruel yet denied the drama of pestilence, fire, war, invasion, blitz. In these horrors there was undoubtedly anguish, but there were also opportunities for redemption. At the very least there were lots of things to write about. Stuart thought Pepys was a very lucky man. Circumstances and history had smiled on him.
Stuart also wondered to what extent Pepys’ fame relied on the mysterious and the partial. For centuries the diary had been indecipherable, and in a way it was also only a fragment. It was a big enough text but it covered a small part of a man’s life. The sense of interruption was very beguiling. Stuart recalled those elegiac passages towards the end of the diary where Pepys writes of his failing eyesight, his fear of blindness and the ensuing, gathering darkness. The diary was finished unwillingly.
And Stuart wondered by what means, literary or otherwise, his own text might be given a similarly beguiling resonance. Judy had told him to fuck off and die, and, more politely put, that was pretty much Anita’s message to him too. He knew that the death of the author could be a great help to a work of literature. It was a frame that could completely transform a painting. Suicide even more so. He could see the appeal of a London journal that began with high, all-encompassing hopes like his own, and was abruptly completed by the author’s suicide. Suppose a man had seen the whole of London, every part, every street, every dark corner, and had become tired of it. What else was there to do but die? It sounded like a fabulous ploy, a great step forward and a great ending. As he walked past St Paul’s School where Pepys had been a student, his only regret was that he suspected he was too much of a coward to kill himself.
FIRE
Stuart was asleep, Anita breathing gently beside him. In spite of everything they still slept together. It must have been three in the morning when the phone rang on her side of the bed. She exchanged just a few words with whoever was on the other end, then lightly replaced the receiver, got up and went to the window. She drew back the curtains and stood there a long time looking out, and although she didn’t try to rouse Stuart he was now folly awake and his curiosity pushed him out of bed. He took up his place beside her at the window and together they looked out at a distant, flickering orange glow in the night sky. There was a fire burning across the other side of the city. It looked large and fierce but it was far enough away that they soon felt able to go back to bed, thinking it had nothing to do with them.
When they woke next morning and looked out again there was smoke in the sky and the fire was still burning, but in daylight it was much less dramatic, and if anything it looked further away. It was only when Anita listened to the radio and heard the news that hundreds of Dockland apartments had been consumed by fire that either she or Stuart began to take the situation at all seriously.