The men of Kent escaped from this horror across the river. The Essex ten, claiming a moral — if pyrrhic — victory, ran off over the drawbridge into the sunken levels.
A photograph, promoting the glories of the station concourse at Tilbury, before the reconstruction, features a newspaper kiosk, with the day’s headlines clearly visible: BIRTHDAY HONOURS. BATTLE IN THE SUDAN. Six massively moustached porters stand at ease, barring all bogus claimants from the Third Class Waiting Room.
Joblard and I, subdued, retreated; by bulwark and counter-scarp, through fausse-braye and cunette, to the Dead House. We passed out by the Landport Gate and turned towards the hope of the World’s End. On the far shore of the outer moat was the dark tangle of a wild orchard: the gentle flicker of candlelight behind shaded windows. Shrill laughter on the evening air.
VIII
When does a victim realize that he is the chosen one? When does a ‘fall guy’ receive the first intimations of vertigo?
Arthur Singleton, his whites held in place by a knotted Kingston Park tie, stood queasy and distempered, leaning breathless against the brass line of zero longitude. A pale stripe of virtue ran away from his navel and down Maze Hill, between the twin domes of Greenwich Hospital, across the river, and far around the red-splashed globe: to pierce, on its return, his psychic body. A shocking, but unremarked, jolt in the lower spine. He had completed his preparation. He did not salute the bullet-pocked plinth of General James Wolfe, abseiler-extraordinary, and exporter of ‘high degree’ Freemasonry to the North American continent. He walked, head bowed, along the broad avenue towards the heath. He was bent to his fate, tapping his bat on the ground at every third stride.
Singleton felt a tingling in his palms; the sympathy pains of martyrdom that presaged an heroic contest. He could sense the stigmata sweating blood into his white gloves. Today would be exceptional. He rested and fed all his doubts into a giant oak. The tree was a metaphor for the innings he would play. The roots were laid in the vision of the city, seen from the hill. The trunk was the slow build-up of confidence: ‘seeing’ the ball, before it left the bowler’s hand. And then the branching out, the flowering. The strokes all round the wicket, sketching the tree’s shape into the ground for ever. He had only a necessary fear of the opposition, coupled with the still greater fear of losing ‘face’ among his fellows; the cramming masters, curates, and medical men of Blackheath who would this afternoon meet Lord Harris’s eleven in a charity match, for the benefit of the dependants of the drowned, in the tragedy of the sinking of the paddle-steamer, the Princess Alice. The sky was bruised and purple, racing, livid with threat and prophecy.
Dr Grace, the Hon. Alfred Lyttleton, Lockwood: names set into the earth like pillars of a temple. Arthur was at the wicket and taking guard with no memory of the preliminary courtesies; the introductions, the toss, the early collapse of the local men. He was wholly detached from the scene, which could have been an engraving in the London Illustrated News. His foot moved towards the first delivery — short on the leg side — and the spectators were applauding a boundary.
The heath was enclosed in a bell jar of wild light, high clouds chased and harried. He was standing on the world’s curve — and he stood erect, shaping each drive, timing each cut, chipping wide of the stolidly planted fielders. Dr Grace was shaking him by the hand. His voice was unexpectedly high in pitch. Arthur could not understand what he was saying. He walked off. The fever-drained grass stretched into an endless plain. The dark houses slid from his sight. ‘Singleton, well done! Capital display, sir! Fine knock, Arthur!’
He forced a passage through the press of friends and strangers: the ladies, their parasols, their billowing dresses. Soaked. Dripping on to the ground. Shadows that could drown him. Uncovered bodies. Did they need to bring them here? Hair shapeless and obscuring their faces. No eyes. Tongues like slaughtered animals. White mud. Don’t touch. Their cold hands scorch his arm. The dead ones block him. Their fingers twist around his heart. ‘I felt I was going to be like Mother and the best thing for me was to die.’
Mother was waiting. She offered me her cheek. She had come back, to watch. ‘Arthur, my boy, what has disturbed you? And where is your wig? Surely, you cannot intend to enter court in this undress?’
The boundary ring has been posted with the unfortunates. They are laid out — a catch, a pale harvest — upon wrinkled black tarpaulin sheets. They shine in pitch. They have been hooked and drawn from the river. The heaped poor. They are swollen with death. They did not learn to swim. We have scraped the water from them like a caul of skin.
Now they are calling for the doctors. ‘Doctor, a moment. Your signature, sir. For my godson. Would you oblige me… your name…’ Bury me! Blind me! Cut out my tongue! Now the umpires, the white coats, are at my elbows. ‘He must rest.’ Clear him; carry him to a secure place. A place in history. Justice will be done in Wisden’s Almanac. Arthur Singleton’s stout innings on a sticky wicket against the established men of England. An obituary tribute to a fine cricketer, and a gentleman; a Wykehamist, a scholar of New College, Oxford.
Leaning on his bat, Arthur is led from the field. He passes through a narrow gate in the wall, and into a private garden. He taps his willow, with every third stride, on the gravel.
IX
We stood outside the World’s End, reluctant to enter, to break the spell of silence. Shadow blades of the pear tree thrash the sailcloth windows. Tupping marionettes. Remote voices. Wood smoke. ‘The dead are dancing with the dead.’ This clapboard shanty has been sifted from the spoils of the river; nailed together out of drowned timber — spar set to mast, pegleg to oar — ramped out of chaos. World’s End, fin du globe.
The door was not locked. We pushed through to the bar. And backed our drinks into a remote corner. Uninvited guests at the requiem for an orgy that was still waiting to happen.
I put the photocopies I had made from Patrick Hanbury’s Researches in Polynesia and Melanesia on to the table, to show them to Joblard — who had a taste for the impossible. He liked to stretch the boundaries of disbelief until he achieved a frisson of naked panic. He used his fear to kick-start a slumbering consciousness.
‘Certain spots,’ wrote Hanbury, ‘particularly those associated with death, are haunted. I recollect that two members of the hospital staff met a devil… and were so terrified that they dropped most of their clothes, but would not return to find them.’
Hanbury’s photographs are a metaphor for the story of tribal contact with Europe, and the cruel refinements of European light. They demonstrate, in growths of outlandish tissue, our need to capture the extraordinary: to analyse, convert, to put a price on. The amused subjects stand willingly before the hooded stranger and his tripod. They accept the presence of the black box that will reduce them; shift them to a generality, an illustration of a definable tendency. Delicate ritual markings become ‘deformities’. Pattern succumbs to elephantiasis; a vast strawberry richness. The scrotum sagging from the warrior to the ground beneath him. Clusters of enlarged follicles. The truly monstrous is calmed by its context. Ulcers, yaws, lesions.