Mr. Timothy: A Novel (23 page)

--The newest word in bodyguards, Mr. Timothy.

I'm standing now, one hand braced against the table to keep me from tottering.

--Are you Mr.
Frig
's bodyguard, George? Or just his little thieving boy?

He looks at me for a few moments, then wraps his arm around Colin's shoulders, hugging the boy to him like a nephew. A font of human kindness is our George.
--I'd hate to see you lose such a fine young bully, Mr. Timothy. Or anyone else belonging to you.

One last squeeze of Colin's shoulder, and he is gone.

Neither of us moves for a good half minute; we're both, I think, trying to resurrect our dignity. Colin's is restored before mine. He pulls back one of the chairs from the table and sits in it side-saddle. Shakes his head and, to my surprise, pulls out a cigarette--palmed, no doubt, from one of last night's guests--and holds it in the flame of a candle.

--Christ alive. You must've fucked 'im but good, Mr. Timothy.

--I wish I had. I think I've only startled him awake.

Colin takes a long, professional drag, exhales in two forked streams of cloud. He rubs the smoke into his hair and takes another drag, even longer.

--What put him in such a fury?

--I can't say.

--Anything to do with that naked old cove running up the stairs last night?

Oh. Oh, I'd quite forgotten that.

--No. Squidgy's quite benign.

--Happy to know someone is.

I am walking now, and it feels so good I find myself circling the table, just as George was doing a few minutes ago, but without the same confident stride--just my own interrupted cadence.

--Listen to me, Colin. I've been giving some thought to our, our little business relationship.

--Oh?

--I've come to believe that it might be in everyone's best interests if we...if we
concluded
it. For the time being.

--What for?

--Well, I think you'd have to agree it's exhausted its usefulness, in a sense. For now. Which isn't to say you haven't been helpful--far from it. You've been, you've been
indispensable
, and I don't know what I would have...really, I can't tell you how--

--Is it George? Coz he's all air, that one. He don't scare me a bit.

--It's not George. It's just that the stakes have got a little higher than any of us expected, and I'm feeling, I suppose,
answerable
in a way I wasn't before. And as a consequence, I think it might be time to call in some institutional help.
--You mean the police?

His tone is every bit as scornful as George's was.

--Perhaps the police. I'm not sure.

Colin jams the cigarette back into his mouth and sucks on it until his whole face is fuming like a smokestack. Then he allows himself a luxuriant cat stretch.

--Well, so fuckin' be it. We had us a good run, didn't we, Mr. Timothy? But a man has to know when his time is up, don't he? You won't see me wringin' my titties over it.

--I'm glad you--

--Anyways, I got me a date with my old mum.

--Your mother?

I don't know why I should be so astonished. He's already mentioned a father, and all humans have
mothers
, don't they? Did I think he'd sprung full-blown from the brow of London?

Well, yes. In a manner of speaking, I did. My surprise must be writ across my face, for Colin quickly adds:

--Oh, she's still about. Somewhere. We got this arrangement, see. Every time I come in to a bit of change, I stop in and give her some. It's a little like tithing, ain't it?

--I didn't...well, I mean to say, that's very good of you, Colin. To think of her.

He waves me off with his cigarette.

--She gets a better class of gin for a few days, that's all. Not that she notices.

Even this tiny glint of revelation is too much for him. He bounds to his feet, cocks his head towards the doorway.

--You making for Captain Gully's? he asks.

--For a while, yes. Then I'm off to see my uncle.

--Uncle who?

I don't answer. I just tap him lightly on the shoulder and point to the door.

On our way out of the dining room, we encounter another early riser, and not a welcome one. Iris stands by the banister, already in her morning dress, with her arms folded across her chest like a harem eunuch and her face frozen in an attitude of suspended relish. There seems nothing to say but:

--Good morning, Iris. To which she has a riposte already prepared, it is clear, but it never materialises, for Colin chooses this moment to grab a healthy chunk of her arse. Whether he molests anything beyond several layers of petticoat I cannot say, but Iris is sufficiently put out to swing her right arm in the general direction of his face. Foreseeing this, Colin has already ducked and squirmed his way through, and when next I see him, he is skittering towards freedom, half crawling, half skating. The door slams behind him before Iris has even realised he's gone.

And with that slam comes an odd twinge in my gut. Absurd. Absurd to expect a formal adieu from Colin the Melodious. He sees his chance, he moves on.

Iris, too, is moving on. It takes her a few seconds to recompose herself, but when she turns back to me, the air of triumph has returned, and so has the arch smile, biting hard at the corners of her mouth.

She presses the backside of a playbill into my palm.

--What's this?

--What does it bloody look like? An
invoice
. You don't suppose you could pinch something of mine, and me not know it?

It's not what I would have expected from her, and I have enough presence of mind to note that the handwriting is not Iris's, nor is the language:

Iris Tulliver hereby demands PS2 in remuneration for the theft of one red ribbon from complainant's dresser

How could I have forgot? The ribbon. The one I gave Philomela back in the graveyard. Still adorning her hair, last I checked.

--Two pounds seems rather dear, Iris. Even by your standards.

--The sum in question takes into account the lost hours of sleep, not to mention the disturbance of having a strange man prowling about, howsoever unthreatening he may be.

I fold up the invoice, tuck it neatly in my waistcoat pocket.

--Thank you, Iris. I'll give it the most careful consideration.

--You'd best do more than that, lest you want the madam knowing of your perverted ways.

--Mrs. Sharpe has seen far worse perversions than ribbon stealing.

--Oh, the ribbon is the least of it, I'm sure.

That last remark will haunt me more than perhaps even she could have guessed. I leave Mrs. Sharpe's house, I pass down Pall Mall, I sidestep an overflowed water plug, I drop a coin in the cup of a blind violoncello player, the muffin man's bell rings out--and it all might as well be a painted backdrop from Peter's photography salon, I barely hearken. I am too engaged in the cataloguing of my sins.
A dismal registry, now that I look back on it. Nothing remotely cardinal. Only a chain of malices and fancies and foreshortened desires.

Pinching Jemmy in the neck once when she complained about having to carry me to the table.

Finding Sam's body in the canal and not telling anyone.

Wishing sometimes that Mr. McReady would come back.

Telling Martha her new husband looked like a boil.

Copulating with a black-toothed woman in a St. Giles mews.

And hating my parents for having the temerity to be my parents. And for keeping me in Camden Town, when there were boy pharaohs to see and racetrack-card vendors to meet and Greek myths to be conned and a whole world waiting to wrap its arms around me.

Well, that's the best I can come up with on short notice. Not a hanging offense in the whole bunch, just the slow, steady attenuation of a soul.

So here I stand, prematurely aged on a young day. Yesterday's wind has blown in the sun, and a gentling hand has been laid over the Strand's commotion, granting a quality of reprieve to one's knuckles and toes and ears. Even the fog has ebbed to half its normal density. Trees, seen up close, reveal their full complexity. It is only farther off that their outlines begin to soften and blur, until the very notion of outline loses its meaning, and one could imagine that the whole world was at sea and these trees were simply the masts of ships, and the sounds of dead leaves chattering around the lampposts the rustle of surf.

In a fog such as this, shapes don't just appear; they seem to be forming on the spot from the materials of one's own mind. Behold! a coster's donkey. Lo! a woman with a parasol. A billboard advertisement for Foster's Vintage Ports. An abandoned brazier.

And Father. Mustn't forget Father.

Today he has metamorphosed into a dealer in fancy-ware, stationed near St. Martin-in-theFields. A rather fashionable location for your common swag, and the merchandise is pitched accordingly high. Lovely scarf pins and display vases and gilt frames. Leather and bead purses, plated jewelry. A pair of coloured-glass sleeve links in the shape of mastiffs.

Father takes justified pride in these goods. Note the gently proprietary pose of his hands as they rest on the barrow. I would recognise those hands anywhere. The face, too, for that matter, even if it is disguised in a chest-length beard.

The voice, though, is foreign. So unalterably foreign it stings.

--Ah, I see you got your eye on the eardrops, sir. Take my word for it, they makes a lovely lady even lovelier.

And in this manner, Father vanishes as abruptly as he appeared. And just when I was ready to pepper him with questions:

How is the post where you are? And have you bumped into Serafino Rotunno?
And just what are the dead afraid of?

I shall have to write them all on a piece of paper next time, and hurl it straight into his ectoplasmic heart.

--Why, we never knew we had so much grime about us, Tim. Boggles the mind, don't it?

So says Captain Gully, standing fully erect on his chair while waves of domestic industry wash at his feet. Philomela, sporting yesterday's trousers, has just swept under the chair, having already beaten the hearth rug and swept away the ashes, and now, without a moment's respite, she throws herself onto all fours to swab the metal surfaces of the fireplace with blacking. In between the rubbings of the rag, I can hear her brief exhalations; I can see her pinked complexion and the lines of sweat leaching through her temples. Going at it with every fibre of her being, is our Filly, and I know enough of her not to be surprised. She has to earn her room and board somehow, doesn't she?

The amusing part is how Gully keeps pointing her out to me--with his whole arm extended, as though she were a comet or a zoological specimen.

--We'll have you know, Tim, before dawn, before we was even out of bed this mornin', this'n was heating the copper and scrubbin' the bejeezus out of our shirts. Look at 'em, Tim! They're positively holy!

It's true. Gully's still-damp shirts billow in the open window like the suspended bodies of priests. They have left a film of perspiration over everything in the room: tabletop, chairs, globe, scrimshaw, even Gully's upper lip.

--We says to her, we says, "Come away, lass, there's no need, so early in the day." And she gives us such a look as though to say, her English not being what ours is,
Why, what better time is there
? And Gully knows he's a beaten man, he does, so he gives her free rein, don't he? And blessed if she don't take to the work like a hog to shit.

--Well, it's delightful, Captain, to see the two of you getting on so famously.

--Oh, we're boon companions, that's what we is. Ain't we boon companions, now, Filly?

A slow, abiding nod from the scrubbing girl. She must have been asked this question many times in the past twenty-four hours.

--Last night, we was playin' a bit of casino, Tim, and it took her maybe three rounds to get it down. To the point she was slaughterin' us by the end of the evening! And then, 'fore that, we had a go of backgammon. Natural genius, Tim. There she was, just a few particklers of instruction, and lo and behold and never say die, she was a-leapfroggin' over us 'fore the hair could even settle on our head. Weren't you, now, Filly? A bloody prodigy, weren't you?

Another nod. --Not that we lets her out of our sight, Tim. Oh, perish the thinkin'. Why, if there's water to fetch, it's Gully as does it. If there's cold pork 'n' beans or sherry to be got, why, Gully's your man. Never goes out but by the back way. Always looks both directions lest he's being shadowed.

He demonstrates it for me. Swivel, swivel.

--And mind you, every time we comes back, don't you think we uses a Secret Knock? So she knows it's Gully and not some malfeasor? Look, we'll as good as show you.

He disappears into the outer hallway. A pause of five seconds and then a gentle tattoo on the door, recognisable (from its metre alone) as the opening bars of "Pop Goes the Weasel."

And then, on cue, Philomela's voice, articulating with the greatest care:

--Come in, please.

At which invitation the door swings open to reveal Gully, beaming from his soles on up.

--You see, Tim? Works like a charm, every blessed time.

The next hour passes like the most benign of factory shifts. Gully hums his fragments of Christmas carol and scans the paper for corpses ("Oh, now this'n looks promisin', a leaper off Blackfriars. Can't have drifted far, can he?"). Philomela dusts the globe and the scrimshaw collection and the pile of atlases and plumps herself down by Gully's chair to clean her boots. Rotating divisions of cats brush against the furniture, leap from the windowsill, or simply gaze about in a fog--perplexed, I imagine, by the peace that has dropped on them like mercy.