‘Or on it, face down.’
‘That’s it. I’m going to need your finished adaptation in a month so give this your best upmarket thinking and get back to me in the next couple of days with your outline.’
‘Sol,’ said his classically endowed secretary, ‘I have Kuwait for you.’
Mazzaroth squeezed my hand. ‘We’ll talk soon, OK? Let’s have lunch.’
‘What about Dracula? I finished it this morning.’
He took the envelope from me. ‘This’ll run in the last issue of Classic Comics. Ciao.’
‘Bye-bye,’ said his secretary, her name was Kim. I found myself in the waiting-room looking up at the Calder that stirred silently like speech balloons from God. I was going down in the lift; the doors opened; the building was behind me; the sounds of High Holborn closed around me; I was out in the street feeling unlucky and walking in such a manner that oncoming pedestrians found me opposing them like a mirror image, sidestepping with them in perfect synchrony to do the same again. I sensed that something that until now had taken no notice of me had slowly lifted up its head and was watching me. There leaped into my mind those lines from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn’d round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Then of course my cruel picture-shuffling mind gave me Luise as an albatross soaring on a boundless marine sky. There was a leaden feeling in my arms and in my chest; I wished from the bottom of my heart that Sol Mazzaroth had never mentioned Orpheus to me.
In the underground I looked up and found the pseudo-Greek ORPHEUS TRAVEL card staring at me. The light in the carriage was like the light in someone else’s bathroom when you’re sick at a party.
Trying to walk naturally and be invisible I surfaced at Oxford Circus and made my way to Istvan Fallok’s Piranesi corner of Soho. There he was in his electronic twilight with his veiled music going and all his little eyes glowing their different colours around him in the dusk.
‘How’s it going?’ he said.
‘It’s too soon to say.’ I gave him the electrodes and the wires and a cheque for fifty pounds and he tore up the cheque and gave me my anorak.
‘Want a coffee?’ he said.
‘Not now, thanks.’ I almost said, ‘I’m being followed.’
‘You look as if you were about to say something.’
‘I often look that way. I’ll be going now. See you.’
‘See you,’ said Fallok, and receded into his musical twilight.
8 Tower Hill and the Cheshire
Cheese
When I got home I sat at my desk but I couldn’t bear the thought of making words appear on the screen. I looked up Orpheus in the telephone directory. There were only Orpheus Travel in the Fulham Road, Orpheus Wines, Impt & Whlslrs in SE16, and the Orpheus & Tower Bridge Club in Savage Gardens, EC3.
Savage Gardens! I dialled the number and after four or five rings a woman answered, ‘Orpheus and Tower Bridge Club; can I help you?’ In the background I could hear the clatter of cutlery and crockery.
‘Can you tell me what sort of a club it is?’ I said.
‘It’s a members’ club.’ She sounded busy.
‘You mean, people just come there to eat and drink?’
‘Yes, it’s just a members’ club.’
‘There’s no musical activity of any kind?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that.’
‘How does one become a member?’
‘There’s a form to fill in.’
‘Haven’t I got to be proposed by somebody?’
‘Oh yes, you’ve got to be proposed and seconded by members of the club.’
‘I don’t know anybody who’s a member.’
‘What company or firm are you with?’
‘I’m not with anyone, I’m a freelance writer.’
‘Just a minute.’ She consulted briefly with someone. ‘Yes, that’s all right. Come along.’
‘What are your hours?’
‘We’re here from nine to seven.’
‘You don’t do suppers then.’
‘Oh no, we only do lunches.’
The idea of a club of people eating lunches was frightening to me. Orphic action seemed unlikely in such a setting. Still, I thought, a place called Savage Gardens must have significance.
I looked it up in my A to Z. It was just by the Tower Hill tube station, close to Trinity House and Trinity Square, near Seething Lane, Hart Street, and Crutched Friars. South of it were the river and Tower Bridge.
I left the house at about five o’clock. It was novembering hard outside; the dark air sang with the dwindle of the year, the sharpening of it to the goneness that was drawing nearer, nearer with every moment. Pinky-orange shone the electrical-hibiscus street lamps; almost their light had a fragrance; the brown leaves underfoot insisted on the ghosts of dark trees standing in the place of lamps and houses; the pinky-orange globes hung mingled with the swaying dark and winter branches; the winter lights and traffic, the winter walkers in the dark street all moved through the ghostly wood and went their way upon the ancient leafy track.
Fulham Broadway station, its platforms half indoors, half out in the weather and the winter dark, was lit up and festive looking, the people moving down the stairs to the platforms seemed each of them the forward edge of a fascinating story urgent to be told. The first train was an Edgware Road one; I got on and changed to an Upminster train at Earl’s Court.
The train rumbled eastward through the evening. People surged on and off, each face sharp and clear and undeniably of the present moment. At every station I felt more responsive, as if a slider on a rheostat was advancing with the train: Sloane Square, Victoria, St James’s Park, Westminster, Embankment, Temple, Blackfriars, Mansion House, Cannon Street, Monument…
Tower Hill! With others I poured out of the train in a many-legged movement up the stairs into the bright darkness and the smell of roasting chestnuts and the purposeful rush towards us of homegoers from the offices all around, their faces strong with evening and November, sharp and clear with actuality under the pinky-orange hibiscus lamps, under the wild sky and the dark tower by the running of the dark and shining river.
Past Trinity Square I went, looking up at the dim whiteness of the Port of London Authority with its columns and its statue that was now obscure in its niche, the building fabulous against the dark sky like an Edmund Dulac mosque. I turned into Savage Gardens, full moons in my mind and innocent mystic lions by the Douanier Rousseau. No moon, no lions. I continued past Trinity House with its elegant lantern, past new brick and stone rising from the old. On one of the old brick arches of the railway bridge to Fenchurch Street Station I saw black lettering on a white background: The Orpheus & Tower Bridge Club. The club itself was on the near side of the railway bridge, just beyond Ye Olde Englishe Clubbe. Through the arch of the bridge the Cheshire Cheese was visible.
The entrance to the Orpheus & Tower Bridge Club was a modest glass door like that of a small hotel. By then I understood that the main fact of this particular evening was the novembering of it, the pinky-orange hibiscus lamplight, the clear bright darkness between the lamps, the smell of roasting chestnuts, the coming to a point of the dwindling year; I went past the door without stopping, I didn’t want to fill in a form.
Before me the bridge loomed great-arched, great-shadowed, high in the lonesome evening, waiting like a stage set while the trains rumbled over it into and out of Fenchurch Street. In Crutched Friars in the darkness under the bridge the Cheshire Cheese stood dimly and invited with its golden windows. It looked not too lively, not too bright, decently tired. A sign on the door warned that: