Tales of Accidental Genius

Beloved friend Barbara Wersba

M
R.
B
AXTER WAS
the only private resident on a London street of men's tailors and barbershops.

His small house, once home to the St. James's Church clergy, was built in 1762 against the back wall of the church, between Piccadilly and Jermyn Street.

Whether by accident or inspired planning, the church sometimes appeared to embrace the little house, with two brick arms uniting in their ambition to form a spire.

During an emergency renovation in the 1960s, an unexploded bomb from World War II was found in a sewer beneath the church, and the Jermyn Street shops were evacuated for several hours. A few of the more senior tailors were reminded of the Blitz, when people in the shelters shared bars of chocolate or took turns on a cigarette.

Although Mr. Baxter had lived on Jermyn Street for eighteen years and did not speak to anyone regularly, he was well-known to his commercial neighbors by sight.

At first it was his sheer girth and height that caught their attention, and for a long time, they called him “The Giant of
Jermyn Street.” But then one of the barbers recognized Mr. Baxter from years ago, when he was in the tabloids and known by a different nickname.

After almost two decades, those who worked regular hours on the street, from Floris to Turnbull & Asser, had grown so use to their residential neighbor that when he passed their windows every day on his walk home from St. James's Park (blocking out the sun for a few seconds), it was not his size they noticed—but a falling trouser hem or jacket in desperate need of a “sponge and press” or the flapping sole of a size 14 brogue.

Despite his age, Mr. Baxter was still heavily muscled, with enormous hands kept awkwardly at his sides. His eyes were a deep blue and quicker than his body, making him appear more nervous than he actually was. There were no longer any traces of brown in his hair, and his bones ached from time to time, depending on the weather.

When the London drizzle was too constant, Mr. Baxter sat in a chair by the window. There were usually people in the street below, and the shop windows glowed with hope and promise. He knew each retailer by the sound of its bell, and there was a stand where two women sold flowers every day and on Saturday mornings, calling out to passersby in the style of East End market traders. Although Mr. Baxter had no interest in gardening, over time he had learned the Latin names of various plants, and sometimes caught himself saying them late at night when the street was empty.

At closing time, women came to vacuum the shops with chrome Hoovers. One of them was going to have a baby.

In the morning (after a few hours' sleep on the settee), Mr. Baxter normally drank his tea standing up at the window, as window cleaners sloshed down Jermyn Street with buckets and rags. Sometimes they whistled, and the sound fell from their mouths like silver thread.

If the weather was good enough for his daily walk in St. James's Park, Mr. Baxter often found an empty bench to rest and watch people go by, or clouds pass in lines of white shoulders. He wondered where everyone he saw was going, and stared at them the way an illiterate stares at words in a sentence.

There is a deep lake in the middle of St. James's Park, and Mr. Baxter often lingered there too, watching swans fold their wings, or women in head scarves toss crumbs from their pockets. He secured his coat at the waist by knotting a belt. It was a very old coat. Sometimes he wore it over his dressing gown to bed, and there were stains around the hem at the front where he had missed the toilet. He needed eyeglasses to see anything farther than his own large hands, and they were square with gold frames and a brown tint that was once fashionable. Sometimes, a flake of skin would lodge on the glass.

There
was
a time when Mr. Baxter was quite fashionable, and quite involved in goings-on around London—a regular face in the tabloids on account of his clients. But that was long ago, and so when he was woken up one night by someone shouting in the street, it was with more annoyance than concern that he untangled himself from the sheets, felt for his glasses, and shuffled quietly to the far window of the flat to see what was happening.

The person outside was screaming in Jamaican patois, as though involved in an argument, yet he appeared to be alone.

Just another teenage lout
, Mr. Baxter thought, watching the boy pull at the matted clumps of his hair. It was midwinter, and puddles had hardened into ice. Mr. Baxter hoped he might slip on one.

After a while, he sat down and listened to the boy with both hands spread on the kitchen table as though he were a great pianist about to commence his magnum opus.

Of course, it would have been much quieter in the small bedroom at the back of Mr. Baxter's house, but for years he had slept every night on the settee. The expensive floral cotton sheets and pillowcases, purchased one summer afternoon on the top floor of Liberty, lay smooth and undisturbed, like an envelope sealed long ago with nothing inside.

W
HEN THE SHOUTING
man returned to Jermyn Street two nights later, Mr. Baxter listened from his pillow in a sort of daze. It was bitterly cold, and black taxis roared up the cobbled road, their heavy diesel engines rattling the windows.

This can't go on
, Mr. Baxter thought.
I was in the middle of a bloody dream
. He folded back his sheets and perched on the edge of the settee.
All I'm asking for is a bit of peace, and now I've got some mad bastard out there.

The pubs were still open, and the sound of people walking echoed through his apartment like disorderly music.

When Mr. Baxter unlatched the window and peered down at the figure, he noticed a plastic bag of clothes. The arm of a
sweater reached out as if trying to escape. Mr. Baxter shook his head in reproach.

“Some people,” he said loudly, “are a bleedin' nuisance!”

T
HEN FOR A
week the man didn't come and Jermyn Street was a place of general quiet.

It was still so cold that the prime minister himself was telling people not to go out. The demand for coal and wood was unprecedented. Elderly people were found dead at home, upright in their chairs.

Mr. Baxter spent the week lying awake, wondering where the boy had gone, and whether he was inside or outside.

The night he returned, Mr. Baxter pulled on his dressing gown and hurried to the window. It was freezing, but the man below had neither gloves nor hat.

What an idiot
, he thought.
His own bloody fault if he dies out there. Nothing to do with me
.

The few people who were out hurried home from the pubs in clouds of their own laughter. But then, a few shops away, Mr. Baxter heard bins being knocked over. In the distance, a woman and a man were struggling to walk a straight line; then the woman sat down in the middle of the road. The man pulled on her arm, which made her laugh and take a shoe off.

When a speeding car entered Jermyn Street, the boy below Mr. Baxter's window started shouting, “Check out
di rupshan
! Check out
di rupshan
!” Somehow understanding, the drunks lifted their heads and carried their bodies to the pavement, as the car roared past bound for lives less fortunate.

When the road was empty again, they resumed their stumble home through the darkness, and the young man went back to arguing with his imaginary foe.

As the kettle boiled, Mr. Baxter noticed a fork on the kitchen table, left there from his evening meal. Years ago, his father would sometimes wake him up very late at night, telling him to dress and come downstairs. He was only a child then, but understood it would have been worse not to go. Under his bed was a box of toy cars, a cricket bat, and a few broken Spitfire models he had been unable to complete on his own. Pinned to the wall was a football pennant he'd won at the seaside.

After going downstairs, Mr. Baxter would sit squarely in front of his father at the kitchen table, trying not to blink, and slowly hardening into the statue of a boy, so that when the fork came down on the backs of his hands repeatedly, he had only a vague feeling that parts of his body were cracking. Sometimes his father would laugh, or smash a bottle, or split a cupboard door with his elbow. Sometimes he would sweep everything out of the fridge and leave it on the floor.

The next morning, the teachers would want to know why Charlie Baxter couldn't hold his pencil—why his knuckles were black and yellow. He earned a reputation for having the hardest punch in school, though no one had ever seen him fight.

The teachers said the only thing worse than a big bully was a big liar, and made him stand in a corner until ready to confess. But to young Charlie Baxter, it was
their
special secret, and in his child mind, felt his father respected him for keeping it.

A
FTER A WHILE,
Mr. Baxter got tired and went back to the settee. It was warm under the blankets, and his bare feet felt good under the covers. He had no curtains, and moonlight washed over his things, pooling when furniture blocked its path. He thought about what had happened outside with the drunks and the speeding car, then, a moment before falling asleep, wondered if rage isn't just another form of crying.

In the morning, he cooked eight sausages, four eggs, a dozen mushrooms, an entire pack of bacon, and a whole can of Heinz Baked Beans, so that he could make a second, smaller breakfast plate, which he covered and put in the fridge.

Blackened morsels had stuck to the frying pan, but he persisted with the scouring pad, then hung the pan above the sink where it dripped onto a tea towel.

On his walk that day, Mr. Baxter noticed more birds than usual. They had congregated at one end of the pond, where park officials had broken the ice with heavy sticks. Then he stood for some time on the narrow bridge that stretched over the lake. On one side, up past the blowing bare trees and brown water, was Buckingham Palace; on the other side a slow rise of gray marble into Whitehall, where Union Jacks snapped in the wind. The view had not been altered for centuries, and for this reason the bridge was one of Mr. Baxter's favorite haunts, a place where he did not feel defined solely by the things he remembered.

T
HREE NIGHTS LATER,
Mr. Baxter stirred a pot of tea and listened at the window. The moon was out and chalked the edges of a cold and frosty street.

Why hadn't someone called the police and reported a disturbance of the peace? It was now so irritating that Mr. Baxter wanted to aim his teapot at the man's head. He imagined going down there and stuffing him into his black bag of clothes, then tossing it into the icy Thames.

For the first time in years, Mr. Baxter felt violence bubbling to the surface of his life.

Then a bottle shattered against the wall of St. James's Church. Mr. Baxter looked out as another flashed past and landed silently on the boy's bag of clothes. Three men stormed across the road, fists spinning.

Mr. Baxter stood there shaking, his feet half in his slippers. He knew what was happening. He knew exactly what the men intended to do. And this confidence reminded him of who
he
was and of the things
he
had done. He stopped trembling, shuffled fully into his slippers, and tightened the string on his pajamas.

By the time he got down to the street, there were clothes everywhere, and the boy was a ball on the ground being kicked. The men were laughing and taking turns.

When the form of a giant appeared suddenly from a narrow door in the St. James's Church wall, wearing frayed gingham pajamas and enormous tweed slippers, the three men stopped what they were doing and just looked. For a moment, the sheer
size of Mr. Baxter seemed to deter them. Then one came at him quickly with a broken bottle.

Mr. Baxter had grown up in the East End, and was once quite a dangerous man.

For several years he was Twiggy's bodyguard, then television celebrities, then private events, then nightclubs and well-known pubs in Sloane Square and Chelsea . . . .

He stopped working two decades ago, after waking up in the Royal Free Hospital.

“Who got me?” he said to the nurse. But it was painful even to chuckle.

“No one got you, Rambo,” the nurse said. “You had a heart attack.”

The next day, she brought flowers wrapped in pages from the
London Standard
and arranged them herself in the vase.

“I wouldn't waste those on me, darlin',” Mr. Baxter said.

“As these here are my flowers,” the nurse told him, “I'll waste them on whomever I choose.”

Some nights she stayed a bit later and read to him from a book.

No one had ever read to him from a book.

D
OWN ON
J
ERMYN
Street, Mr. Baxter's body moved with the old knowledge. He was slower, but still mighty in his reach, and the man who had come at him with a bottle was soon on the ground with a shattered jaw. When a second attacker lunged, Mr. Baxter took a punch in the side of the head, then split the man's nose with a light jab and followed up with a hook. The third man just
stood there screaming that he was going to stab Mr. Baxter—but then backed away when he noticed a figure running toward him up the street with an enormous pair of scissors.

When all three attackers had gone, the man on the ground tried to sit up. His face was an absolute mess. The tailor put down his garment scissors and breathlessly introduced himself as Colin. Then he pointed in the direction of his shop, “New and Lingwood, bespoke and ready-to-wear.”

Mr. Baxter judged him to be about the same age as himself, but with a fuller head of hair and a faint South African accent.

“I'm Charlie Baxter.”

“Yes, yes . . . I know who you are,” Colin said, still trying to catch his breath in the freezing air. “The Menace of Mile End! I used to read about you in the papers years ago.”

Then the man on the ground leaned on his hands and vomited.

Colin looked around at all the clothes. “I suppose we'd better pick these up,” he said. “If you hand them to me, I'll fold them properly into the bag.”