Mr. Timothy: A Novel (19 page)

In the end, Mr. McReady lasted only a little longer than the others, although he would have stayed for the rest of his life. That, at any rate, is the vow he made me in his letter, the one he sealed inside a perfumed envelope and slipped into my coat pocket. A fascinating document-- I wish I still had it with me. Disjointed autobiography, for the most part: the salad days of Oxford and Professor Jowett and Professor Pater and the Newdigate Prize and then some shadowy ellipsis and Eden gone like smoke. None of it made much sense to me, but the closing peroration was extraordinary. A hymn to the love of Jonathan and David. And yes, a pledge of undying fealty. Most embarrassing to a thirteen-year-old; it seemed an act of kindness not to mention it. But as luck would have it, Mother found the letter--probably smelt it during her daily house rounds--and complained to Uncle N, and that was all for Mr. McReady.

You probably didn't notice his absence, Father. He was just another tutor.

Back to our story. Having witnessed the dismal progress of the tutoring profession, the kindly old gentleman resolves to take the boy's education into his own hands. Pedagogy is not his natural bent, but what's to be done? He's the only one who can be trusted with this precious cargo. And so the boy and the gentleman travel to the Crystal Palace (the old man grumbling the whole while at the profligacy of it, the
foreignness
). They attend operas and plays. The boy is especially struck by Charles and Ellen Kean in
Much Ado About Nothing
at the Princess's Theatre. The dazzling intimacy of their exchanges--the boy flushes and looks away, as though he has blundered into someone's boudoir. At some point in the middle of the third act, the old gentleman leans in to him and says
:

--That chap had a father, I think. An actor like him. Can't recollect the name offhand, but quite good in what was that play, the one with the Jew?
He is trying his best, this old gentleman. It isn't his fault he isn't Mr. McReady.

They go to see the Keans many times after that, and the boy grows quite comfortable in their boudoir. The trouble is he must always leave it. He must come back to Camden Town. Not to the same house as before, no: the father's salary is enough now for moving up in the world-- a few blocks, at least--and the family now has a maid. (The mother follows the poor thing round the house, making sure she has emptied the ashes properly and hasn't singed the bread or beaten the rugs upwind.) It is not the castle in which the boy almost certainly began life, but it is, all in all, a fine bourgeois establishment, with bay windows and railed areaways and, most miraculous of all, a bedroom for each of the children.

But it still has a garret, almost indistinguishable from the one the family left behind. And this is where the boy finds himself most afternoons and evenings. Reading, reading. The oncebanned Jonson and the second half of Shakespeare's sonnets and Keats and Sterne and Hobbes and Kant. And Hume, under whose spell he spends each day refusing to believe his family will necessarily be there the following morning. This is fully in accord with the mythos into which he has been indoctrinated.

The boy reads in the garret because it is the one place where he can be sufficiently alone-- and of course the one place that most accentuates his aloneness. Staring through the narrow grid of the window mullions, he sees able-bodied boys and men striding past, jaunty and crowing and charged with animal promise. Striding into their future. Creating their own boudoirs. While there he sits, still dreaming, still waiting for The Event, which is his private term for the public realisation of his destiny. He envisions it as a carriage, a grey brougham pausing at the curb in front of his house, opening its door.

The carriage never comes. And that is when the boy begins to get well. Because it is either get well or stay in that garret for the rest of his life. And he believes, still he believes, that he is meant for better things. He just doesn't know what they are. Down to the present day, he persists, not knowing.

Chapter 12

I FIRST MET SIGNOR ARPELLI three summers ago. He was selling halfpenny ices from a barrow in Saffron Hill, one of about ten Italian gentlemen crowded into the same small court for the same unremunerative purpose. For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity--I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes.

In any event, I bought ices from him whenever I was passing through, and one day, I stopped a pair of boys from running off with his barrow, a small act for which he was lavishly grateful. It was then he sketched for me the impressive downward trajectory of his life: artist's atelier in Pisa, doomed romance with a
contino
's daughter, duel, hair's-breadth escape across Lake Geneva, portrait painting on the Rive Gauche, half-voluntary servitude to a Montmartre
charcutier
, steerage across the Channel...halfpenny ices.

Since then, his fortunes have improved somewhat. A banker in Portland Place hired him to teach Italian to his three corvine daughters, but that ended abruptly when the banker absconded to Honduras with a mess of securities. More recently, Arpelli has gone into business with a French card dealer: the two of them earn a modest income replacing signs and tickets for linen drapers and small merchants. Each morning, M. d'Antin scours the windows of Regent and Oxford Streets for some especially dingy specimen of lettering, then rushes into the offending establishment with a flutter of handkerchief and a trailing moan: "But this thing in your window! It is too awful!" Caught dead to rights, the guilty merchant atones for his aesthetic crime by commissioning a new work.

It is Arpelli's job to carry out the commission, in a small attic in High Holborn--a hot, close space, even in the dead of winter. And yet when I come knocking, he is sporting the costume he wears all year round: a weathered woollen jacket pulled up at the collar, as though to keep off a north wind. He holds his paintbrush as casually as a fountain pen, and periodically breaks off work to toss morsels of bread to a pink mouse that sits obediently by his elbow.

--Good morning, signor.

--Mr. Cratchit! What a surprise. And how kind of you to visit me in my studio.

--Business is good?

--It is....

He gestures towards the square of cardboard that has been occupying him for the past half hour:

Try our own dripping at 6d. a lb.

--The masterpieces must wait, Mr. Cratchit.

--It was ever so.

--May I offer you some cocoa?

--No. Thank you, no.

He pulls a tangle of hair from his forehead, brushes a crumb from his moustache. Smiles.

--There is something I may do for you, Mr. Cratchit?

--I'm very sorry to trouble you. I wonder if I might borrow an hour of your time. --An hour?

--I'm in rather urgent need of an interpreter.

The truth is, I am prepared to take any of several tacks with him. Flattery. Pathos. The call of the motherland, the spirit of Father Christmas. I am prepared to argue, propitiate, bribe. None of that proves necessary. All it takes is a brief perusal of my eyes, and Signor Arpelli is opening his hands and saying:

--I am a happy man, Mr. Cratchit. I may at last repay my debt to you. You will please wait while I leave a note for M. d'Antin.

Minutes later, we are strolling arm in arm down Chancery Lane, as companionable as school chums. I have always wondered at the transformative powers of personality--Arpelli is the most signal exemplar I know. His clothes are not conspicuously new, his shirt linen is too thick to be elegant, the boots rather too square to be fashionable, the greatcoat too heavily fondled by its previous owners. And still he carries himself like a manor-born dandy. Walks on the outside of the sidewalk, sidesteps the coffee stalls with practised ease, smiles benevolently on the newsboys, the wall workers, the chimney sweeps.

And when he sees me glance over my shoulder, he mimes the same gesture, as if it were the gentlest of pastimes. And with an air of utmost tact, he murmurs:

--I think perhaps we are being followed, Mr. Cratchit.

--I'm inclined to agree, signor.

--Followed most inadequately, I should add. By a tall man in a velveteen jacket.

--And a blue-check waistcoat.

--The same.

Arpelli removes two purses from his coat pocket, tucks one into an inner compartment, and pats it back to sleep.

--This gentleman is an acquaintance of yours, Mr. Cratchit?

--No.

--Perhaps you know his employer.

--In a manner of speaking.

--And you will forgive my asking twice, but where is it we are going?

--Craven Street.

--Very good.

Arpelli snaps up the brim of his hat and gives his moustache a quick caress. --If you please, he says.

Just the barest pressure on my arm, and we are moving. Not forwards, as before, but on a tangent, and with all deliberate speed, so that the Strand is soon left behind, and before I can get my bearings, we are passing into a narrow alley, musty and unregarded. The backsides of flats rise up on all sides, and whatever light the day once offered is gone, and a vague claustrophobia gnaws at my stomach as I whirl around just in time to see the man in the velveteen jacket pause at the alley's entrance, then continue past.

--He will return, says Arpelli. Don't you agree?

A flight of steps carries us into Strand Lane and then to an old watch house, in whose archway Arpelli pauses. Leaning on a rusted iron railing, he makes a show of consulting his timepiece.

--An ideal time for a plunge, wouldn't you say, Mr. Cratchit?

It has taken me this long to realise where we are: the old Roman bath.

But then, it's been twelve years since I was here last. Dragged by one of Uncle N's religious enthusiasts, who was convinced the waters were fed by the Holy Well of St. Clement and had curative properties. Cold is the only property I can recall at present: the ague I contracted here kept me in bed for three days.

That memory rises in me now like a foreboding, but rather than wait for my protest, Signor Arpelli skips down the stone steps into the brick vault. And as I follow him, it seems we are dropping into another time altogether. The sulphurous tendrils of air, the tingle of rot, the faintly overlapping slaps of water in the crucifer-shaped plunge pool--everything breathes a spell of antiquity.

And the bath attendant himself is the very image of Charon: a hairless, toothless, almost jawless man, rasing us from his memory even as he hands us our towels and robes.

--They'll be no undue splashin'. And please to keep the voices to a pleasin' murmur.

As we pass into the changing room, I feel Arpelli's hand once again in the crook of my arm, drawing me back with him into a tiny niche. And there we wait, hidden from view, eyes fastened on the entranceway. We wait.

Not for long, as it turns out. The footsteps announce themselves like a judgement, echoing with unnatural volume against the arched ceiling. The man in question arrives a full minute later, scratching the lapel of his velveteen jacket and offering Charon the most tentative of smiles.

--Excuse me, we hear him say.--I was meaning to meet a couple of friends here.

I whisper in Arpelli's ear:

--You should know, I'm not the fleetest of runners.

--I am relieved to report that running will not be necessary, Mr. Cratchit, I myself being too old for such games. This way, please.
We never do make it to the changing room. A yard or so shy of the entranceway, Arpelli draws me off to the left into a region of pure darkness. The hand now leaves my elbow, and Arpelli disappears without a word.

Paralysed, unable to see more than an inch in front of me, I wait there in the blackness, listening for some report of my companion: a shuffling footstep, the tiniest grunt. But the only sounds come from the region of light. The churning of the Holy Well water against the brick. The pensive footsteps of the velveteen man, converging on our hiding place.

Riveted there in the darkness, I suck in my breath, willing myself into invisibility. My muscles quiver from the combined impulses of holding still and jerking into flight, and just when I think they will explode from the contradiction, Arpelli's hand reappears--like light made palpable--drawing me even further into the dark.

As if to compensate for the loss of sight, my other senses prickle into full maturity. My lips taste whale oil. My nostrils pick out a wafting trail of salt. The hair on my skin dances to the music of magnets.

And my ears discern a voice, Signor Arpelli's voice, impossibly distant.

--Close it behind you, if you would.

It takes some groping before my hands find what he means--a flat abraded stone surface that yields with surprising ease. As it swings back, it herds the sound before it, so that even the footsteps of the velveteen man enter a realm of memory.

--Take my arm, Mr. Cratchit. We haven't far to go.

Slow is our pace, a half-step at a time. The smell of salt intensifies as we pass through the darkness, as if to season the other smell that gathers around us, thick and vegetative. At one point, seeking an anchor, I lean against a greasy sponge of wall, which quickly gives way, swallowing my arm all the way to the elbow before I am able to pull it out again.

The claustrophobia ebbs, and after a few minutes, my eyes begin seizing on shapes--dim and bleary-blue--and none blearier than Arpelli, leading me onward. His steps are so sure, his manner so calm, I am tempted more than once to ask how he came to know this causeway so intimately. There is a map, perhaps, some fragile parchment passed down through a lineage of Italian spelunkers, dating all the way back to the Roman centurions who dug these channels out of the earth. But the shroud of arcana in which Arpelli is robed admits for no explanation, and so we pass on in silence.