Ern bobbed his head and glanced away, down to the worn, flypaper-coloured carpet covering the landing from its stair-head to his attic door.
“I’ve got work all this week up at St. Paul’s but shan’t be paid ’til Friday. If there’s anything you’ve hocked I’ll get it back then, when I’ve ’ad me earnings.”
She looked to one side and shook her head dismissively, then went back to decanting the stale golden liquid noisily into her bucket. Feeling scolded, Ern hunched down the stairs into the peeling umber of the passageway, then left and through a door into the cramped fug of the living room, where Annie had a fire lit in the grate. Crouching beside the baby’s chair and trying to get her to take warmed-up cow’s milk from a bottle meant for ginger ale that they’d adapted, Annie barely raised her head as Ern entered the room behind her. Only their lad John looked up from where he sat making a pig’s ear of his porridge by the hearth, acknowledging his father’s presence without smiling.
“There’s some fried bread doing in the kitchen you can ’ave for breakfast, but I don’t know what there’ll be when you get ’ome. Come on, just take a spot o’ milk to please your mam.”
This last remark Anne had directed at their daughter, Thursa, who was still red-faced and roaring, turning with determination from the weathered rubber teat as Ern’s wife tried to steer it in between the baby’s yowling lips. It was a little after seven in the morning, so that the dark-papered cuddle of the room was mostly still in shadow, with the burnished bronze glow from its fireplace turning young John’s hair to smelted metal, gleaming on the baby’s tear-tracked cheek and painting half his wife’s drawn face with light like dripping.
Ern went through and down two steps into the narrow-shouldered kitchen, its uneven whitewashed walls crowding and spectral in the daybreak gloom, a memory of onions and boiled handkerchiefs still hanging in the bluish air, cloudy as though with soap scum. The wood-burning stove was going, with two end-cuts of a loaf frying upon its hob. Clarified fat was sizzling in a pan black as a meteor that fell out of the stars, and spat on Ernie’s fingers as he carefully retrieved the noggins with a fork. In the next room his baby daughter wearily allowed her furious weeping to trail off into accusing hiccup-breaths at sulking intervals. Finding a crack-glazed saucer that had lost its cup to accident he used it as a plate, then perched upon a stool beside the knife-scarred kitchen table while he ate, chewing upon his mouth’s right side to spare the bad teeth on its left. The taste of singed grease flooded from the sponge-pores of a brittle crust as he bit down, scalding and savoury across his tongue, bringing the phantom flavours of their last week’s fry-ups in its wake: the bubble ’n’ squeak’s cabbage tang, the pig cheek’s subtle sweetness, a crisped epitaph for Tuesday’s memorable beef sausage. When he’d swallowed the last morsel Ern was pleased to find his spittle thickened to a salty aspic where the resurrected zest of each meal still enjoyed its culinary afterlife.
Re-crossing the now subdued living room he said goodbye to everyone and told Anne he’d be back by eight that night. He knew that some blokes kissed their wives goodbye when they went off to work, but like the great majority he thought that kind of thing was soppy and so did his Anne. Fastidiously scraping a last smear of porridge from the bowl their two-year-old son John, their little carrot-top, watched stoically as Ern ducked from the fire-lit room into the dingy passageway beyond, to fish his hat and jacket down from off the wooden coat-hooks and then be about his business in the city, somewhere John had dimly heard of but had thus far never been. There was the sound of Ernie’s shouted farewell to his mum, still on her night-soil rounds upstairs, followed by the expectant pause that was his mother’s failure to reply. A short while after that Anne and the children heard the front door close, its juddering resistance when shoved into its ill-fitting jamb, and that turned out to be the last time that his family could honestly say they’d seen Ginger Vernall.
Ern walked out through Lambeth to the north, the sky above a stygian forest canopy swaying upon the million tar-black sapling stems of fume that sprang from every chimney, with the sooty blackness of the heavens only starting to dilute there at its eastern edge, above the dives of Walworth. Exiting his mother’s house in East Street he turned right down at the terrace end and into Lambeth Walk, onto the Lambeth Road and up towards St. George’s Circus. On his left he passed Hercules Road where he had heard the poet Blake lived once, a funny sort by all accounts, though obviously Ern had never read his work or for that matter anybody else’s, having failed to really get the trick of books. The rain was hammering in the buckled gutters of the street outside an uncharacteristically quiet Bedlam, where the fairy-painter Mr. Dadd had been until a year or so before, and where they’d been afraid Ern’s father John would have to go, although the old man died before it had been necessary. That was getting on ten years ago, when he’d yet to meet Anne and wasn’t long back from Crimea. Dad had gradually stopped talking, saying that their conversations were all being overheard by “them up in the eaves”. Ern had enquired if Dad meant all the pigeons, or did he still think there might be Russian spies, but John had snorted and asked Ern just where he thought that the expression ‘eavesdropping’ had come from, after which he’d say no more.
Ern passed by the rainswept asylum on the far side of the street, and speculated distantly if there might be some antic spirit bred in Bedlam, squatted over Lambeth with eyes rolling, that infused the district’s atmosphere with its own crackpot vapours and sent people mad, like Ernest’s dad or Mr. Blake, though he supposed that there was not, and that in general people’s lives would be sufficient to explain them going silly. Down St. George’s Road heading for Elephant and Castle swarmed, already, a great number of horse buses, pushcarts, coal wagons and baked potato sellers dragging stoves like hot tin chests-of-drawers piled on their trolleys, a vast multitude of figures in black hats and coats like Ern, marching with downcast eyes beneath a murderous sky. Turning his collar up he joined the shuffling throng of madhouse-fodder and went on towards St. George’s Circus where he would begin his long hike up the Blackfriars Road. He’d heard that they had train-lines running underground now, out from Paddington, and idly speculated that a thing like that might get him to St. Paul’s much quicker, but he hadn’t got the money and besides, the thought gave him the willies. Being underground like that, how would it ever be a thing that you got used to? Ern was well-known as a steeplejack who’d work on rooftops without thinking twice, sure-footed and quite unconcerned, but being underneath the ground, that was a different matter. That was only natural for the dead, and anyway, what if something should happen down there, like a fire or something? Ernest didn’t like to think about it and decided that he’d stop the way he was, as a pedestrian.
People and vehicles eddied there at the convergence of a half-a-dozen streets like suds about a drain. Making his way around the circus clockwise, dodging in between the rumbling wheels and glistening horseflesh as he crossed Waterloo Road, Ern gave a wide berth to a broadsheet vendor and the gawping, whispering gaggle he’d attracted. From the burrs of chat that Ern picked up passing this pipe-smoke shrouded mob on its periphery he gathered it was old news from America about the blackies having been set free, and all about how the American Prime Minister had been shot dead, just like they’d done to poor old Spencer Perceval, back when Ern’s dad had been a boy. As Ern recalled it, Perceval was from the little boot and shoe town of Northampton, sixty miles from London to the north, where Ern had family upon his father’s side still living, cousins and the like. His cousin Robert Vernall had passed through last June on his way down to Kent for picking hops, and had told Ernest that much of the cobbling work that he’d relied on in the Midlands had dried up because the greycoats in America, for whom Northampton had supplied the army boots, had lost their civil war. Ernest could see it was a shame for Bob, but as he understood things, it was all the greycoats as what kept the slaves, the blackies, which Ern didn’t hold with. That was wrong. They were poor people just like anybody else. He walked across the awkward corner with its little spike of waste-ground where the angle was too sharp to fit another house, then turned left and up Blackfriars Road, making across the smouldering rows of Southwark for the river and the bridge.