He paused to finish his wine, and Crawford waved for a refill. “Thanks. Anyway, being a neffer is similar. You dream about the Alps. A couple of months ago they brought a child from one of the worst Surreyside rookeries to the hospital because he was dying of consumption, and he didn’t last long here; but before he died, he found a piece of charcoal and drew a beautiful picture of a mountain on the wall by his bed. One of the doctors saw it and wanted to know what book the boy had copied the perfectly detailed picture of Mont Blanc from. Everybody just said they didn’t know—it would have been too much trouble to explain to him that the boy had done it out of his head, and that he had never seen a book nor ever been east of the Tower, and that his mother said he’d never drawn anything in his life, not even in mud with a stick.”
“Well, maybe I won’t go there. Maybe I’ll—I don’t know—” He looked up and saw Keats’s smile. “Very well, damn it, I have to go there. Maybe the way out of this whole entanglement is there.”
“Sure. Like the exit from the very bottom of Dante’s hell—and that just led to Purgatory.” Keats got to his feet and put his hand for a moment on Crawford’s shoulder. “You may as well wait for me here. I’ll make sure I’m not followed, and I’ll tell you if I see any official-looking types hanging about. If I haven’t come back in an hour, you’d better assume I’ve been arrested, and just go with what you’ve got on your back and in your pockets.”
CHAPTER 5
Desire with loathing strangely mixed
On wild or hateful objects fixed.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Pains of Sleep
After Keats had left, Crawford estimated the amount of money in the inner pocket of his coat—he hadn’t spent much of Appleton’s fifty pounds, and he figured he still had a fairly good stake—probably eighty pounds, certainly seventy. A little reassured, he waved to the girl and pointed at his empty glass.
He would travel and live cheaply now, and make his money last. In London a person could live, albeit without many new clothes or much meat in the diet, on fifty pounds a year, and things were sure to be less expensive on the continent. And with even a year’s leeway he certainly ought to be able to find himself a niche somewhere in the world.
All he had to do was get across the English Channel, and he was drunkenly confident that he’d be able to do that; hadn’t he been a shipboard surgeon for nearly three years? He assured himself that he still knew his way around a dock, and that even without a passport he would be able to get aboard a ship somehow.
The new beer arrived, and he sipped it thoughtfully. I suppose Julia’s been buried by now, he thought. I think I know now why I wanted to marry her—because a doctor, especially an obstetrician, ought to be married, and because I wanted to prove to myself that I could have children, and because all my friends told me what a stunning catch she was … and partially, I admit, because I wanted to obscure my memories of my first wife—but why did she want to marry me? Because I am, or was, a successful London doctor who seemed sure to come into real wealth before too long? Because she loved me? I guess I’ll never know.
Who were you, Julia? he thought. It reminded him of what she had said about her sister: “She’s got to become Josephine—whoever that may turn out to be.”
It seemed to him that what he would remember about England would be its graves: the grave of his older brother, who from out in the Moray Firth surf had shouted to young Michael for help, twenty years ago—shouted uselessly, for the sea had been a savage, elemental monster that day, crashing on the rocks like gray wolves tearing at a body, and Michael had sat on the high ground and watched through his tears until his brother’s arm had stopped waving and he could no longer identify the lump in the fragmented waves that was his body; and Caroline’s meager memorial, which was just the initials and dates that, one drunken night, he had furtively carved into the wall of the pub that had been built on the site of the house that had burned down with her in it; and now Julia’s grave, which he would never see. And each one was a monument to his failure to be what a man was supposed to be.
And how much, he wondered, of me will I be leaving here, buried in the foam at the bottom of this glass when I leave this inn and walk to London Dock? A lot, I hope. All the Michael Crawfords I tried to be: the ship’s surgeon, because Caroline had preferred a sailor to me; the man-midwife, because there seemed to be value in the innocence of infants. He held his glass up and winked at the warped in vitro reflection of his own face in the side of it. From now on it’s just you and me, he thought at the image. We’re free.
Suddenly Keats was at the window, looking tense. Alarmed, Crawford stood up and unlatched the window and pulled it open.
Instantly Keats pushed his portmanteau in over the sill. “She’s right behind me. Dump this out and give it back to me—she’ll be suspicious if she sees me without it now.”
“Christ.” Crawford took the bag and hastily carried it over to a table that had a tablecloth on it, unbuckled the straps and upended the bag; trousers and shirts tumbled out onto the table, and several rolled pairs of stockings fell off and wobbled across the floor. The barmaid called to him sharply, but he ignored her and ran back to the window. “Here,” he said, shoving the portmanteau back out into Keats’s hands. “Thanks.”
Keats nodded impatiently and made a get down gesture.
Crawford nodded and stepped away from the window, but peered out from around the edge with one eye. The barmaid was saying something behind him, and he dug into his pocket and threw a one-pound note over his shoulder. “I want to buy that tablecloth,” he rasped without looking around.
Keats was walking away from him, out onto the pier, swinging the leather portmanteau ostentatiously. Don’t overplay it, Crawford thought.
A moment later another person walked in front of the window, following Keats, and Crawford instinctively cringed back, for it was indeed Josephine, moving with all the indomitable purpose of one of the gear-driven figurines that emerge from German clock-towers to ring the bells. Crawford hoped for
Keats’s sake that she hadn’t managed to get her pistol reloaded.
Still peering out the window, Crawford backed across the hardwood floor to the table that had all his clothes on it; he flipped up the ends of the tablecloth and balled them up in his good fist.
At the end of the pier Keats glanced back and saw Josephine advancing at him; he swung the portmanteau around like a discus thrower and then let it sail off the end of the pier; Crawford’s whispered curse coincided with the distant splash.
“A pound’s enough for the goddamn tablecloth, I trust,” he said bitterly, thinking of how much he’d paid for the portmanteau.
“Yes sir,” said the barmaid, who edged away from him as he strode across to the street door, swinging his impromptu luggage with a sort of furious nonchalance.
He crossed London Bridge and, after walking east through the Billingsgate fish market, he sauntered as carelessly as he could past the Customs House and the Tower of London, envying the surrounding fish-sellers and housemaids and laborers their indifference to these imposing stone edifices that seemed to personify law and punishment. He kept glancing behind him, but he didn’t see any following figure that walked as though it had been wound up with a key.