The Candle Man (13 page)

‘P
lease . . . no, Mary! I’ll fall.’

‘Come along,’ she said firmly, holding his hand and tugging him gently.

Argyll looked around at the other people strolling along the tidy gravel paths of Hyde Park. ‘I’ll fall over!’ He looked up at Mary, the shame and embarrassment of that
possibility already on his face.

‘I won’t let you, John. I’ll be right beside you.’ She reached down to pull him out of the wheelchair as he awkwardly hefted himself up, cursing as an unlocked wheel
rolled back slightly and his balance momentarily faltered.

He grabbed her shoulder to prevent himself from slumping back in the seat and teetered on his good leg as he probed the ground with the other.

‘I can’t feel a damned thing with this wretched leg!’ he hissed.

‘Come on, let’s just walk for a few dozen yards. See how you get on, love,’ she cajoled him.

Two young women passing by caught the slightest taint of the street in her vowels and the colonies in his. They glanced at each other and smiled patronisingly as they watched the unlikely couple
struggle together.

She pulled out the crutches poking from the carry-bag at the back and handed them to him as he swayed unsteadily on his good leg.

The two young women glanced back once more over shawl-covered shoulders. Mary thought she heard the barely suppressed conspiratorial twittering sound of giggling from them. ‘Ignore those
silly cows,’ she said quietly to him.

He manoeuvred the crutches under his arms and took the weight, steady once more. ‘They’re all watching me,’ he muttered. There were some children standing beside the duck pond
nearby, patiently waiting for him to topple over.

‘No they’re not,’ she replied, louder than was necessary.
‘They’re minding their own bloody business!’

Embarrassed faces flicked away from them.

Mary knew how it was here in the park. A quiet place far away from the vulgarity of the busy street. A place for sensitive social correspondence, for questions to be timidly danced around and
finally hinted at, if not actually asked. For politely veiled inquiries to be made and tactfully ignored. For courtships to begin or be politely brought to an end. A place for quiet exchanges.

Nobody makes a scene here.

Argyll took his first tentative steps, lurching forward on his wooden crutches and doing the best he could to control his entirely numb and stubbornly useless leg.

‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s not so bad.’

He grimaced. ‘This feels so ridiculous. My leg is just fine, after all. I just can’t seem to tell the thing what to do.’

‘You remember what the doctor said, though. The harder you work on it, the sooner you’ll be able to walk normal again, John.’ She pushed the wheelchair along beside him,
keeping close enough that she’d have a chance to catch him in it if he started to lose his balance. ‘It’s like
teachin
’ your leg to walk again. Just like you teach a
baby to walk.’

He gave a dry, humourless laugh. ‘I suppose that’s what I am now: an oversized child for you to have to care for.’ He sighed. ‘Not a
man
anymore, eh?’

‘I’m going to help you get better again.’ She smiled at him. ‘You’re still the same
gentleman
I fell in love with, you know.’

‘But . . .’ He shook his head slowly, thoughtfully. ‘I’m not, am I? I remember nothing of who I was. Nothing of where my home is, who my family are.’ He turned to
her. ‘What was I like? What things did I enjoy? Tell me more about who I was. Please.’

Be careful, Mary.

‘The doctor said I shouldn’t tell you too much about your past.’

‘Well.’ He ground his teeth, exasperated. ‘There’s nothing coming back to me, Mary, not a thing. I hate being like this, so . . . like a blank page, like a damned
blackboard scrubbed clean. I’m . . . I feel like
nothing
. Like an empty space! Please, Mary, please, for pity’s sake, give me something about myself, more than just my
name.’

Take care, Mary.
She knew told lies had to be remembered like a well-told story. Not bandied about willy-nilly. A lie fired off without care had a way of coming back to bite you,
always.

‘Well,’ she began, ‘you already know you come from America.’

Her mind worked hard at all the things she’d heard him say, both awake and sometimes in his sleep. He’d said something about tall buildings once. She knew of only one place in
America with tall buildings. ‘New York, John; that’s where you used to live.’

He nodded thoughtfully at that. ‘It’s like London, isn’t it?’

Mary had no idea at all. ‘Yes, exactly like London.’

‘How long?’

‘How long what?’

‘How long since we . . . how long have you and I been together?’

Mary had originally planned to say they had been living as man and wife for the best part of a year. She’d even considered telling him that they had discreetly married, but that would
require a licence as proof. He might ask which church. He might want to go there to see if it tugged a memory out of his mind. He might want to speak to the chaplain. And then her lie would be
undone.

‘Well, it’s been thirteen months since you sent me flying. Ended up on my bottom in the middle of Covent Garden, my shopping all over the cobbles.’

He muttered an apology. Again. She’d told him about that moment before, but decided to tell it again. Reinforce the story in his mind.

‘Ooh, don’t be daft, my dear. It was very funny. You came bustling around the corner of a grocer’s stall like a bleedin’ steam train. Straight into me, you did. And lord,
you were so embarrassed! So apologetic, so worried you’d hurt me. You picked me up, helped me gather my bits and pieces of shopping and then insisted on taking me to a tea shop.’ She
laughed gaily. ‘You all but marched me to the nearest one and sat me down. Bought us some tea.’ She reached out and squeezed his arm. ‘The perfect gentleman.’

He sighed. ‘Well, that’s a relief.’

‘And so we talked, you and me. Talked the long afternoon away until them market stalls started packing up and the lamp lighters finally came out.’

Her gaze was far off, indulging in the finer details of this particular little fantasy. Many a night she and some of the other street girls had played this same old game down the Firkin,
cackling like fishwives over a beer-damp table and through skeins of pipe smoke. The game? Not so much a game but the collectively authored fantasy of
Meeting the Perfect Gent
. Something
they could all add their tuppence-worth to. A tall man? Yes, of course! Slender or muscular? Oh, he’d have to be a healthy man, all muscles an’ that!

‘And you don’t remember a bit of that, do you?’ she asked Argyll now.

He shook his head sadly. ‘I would like to, though.’ He then stopped, hesitated, with his weight balanced on the crutches. ‘Please tell me that I—’

Her face split with a coy grin. ‘That you
behaved
yourself?’

He nodded.

‘Of course. Treated me like a lady, you did. All Mr Manners an’ that. By the time we had to say good evening, you and me had arranged to take a walk together the next day.’ She
nodded towards the Serpentine, where a cluster of boys in shorts and navy tops played with model boats on the water. ‘Right over there, as it happens. We’ve strolled in this park many
times, John.’ She smiled. The lie came easily. She’d rehearsed the Covent Garden story many times over; a part of the fantasy she’d made up with the girls: the mysterious and
chivalrous gent, rich enough to whisk her away from the grime and the grinding poverty of the East End.

‘We walked in Hyde Park the next day. Talked about this and that and everything. Your life over there in America and—’

‘And your life?’ He lurched another step forward, testing his weight on his numb left leg. ‘What about you?’

She shrugged dismissively. ‘Oh, my life weren’t that much to speak of. Just a workin’ girl.’

‘Tell me again.’

Mary had this part of her fiction all worked out. She stuck to the truth as best she could. And when it wasn’t truth, it was how her life could have gone if fate had been a little
kinder.

‘I used to live in Wales. As a small girl. Then I came to London when I was eighteen. I wanted to see the big city. To explore the very heart of our empire. I suppose I hoped I might find
my fortune here, enough to eventually take me to some exotic far-flung corner of the empire.’ She smiled wistfully. A huff of amusement at the naïveté of her younger self.
‘As it happened, I ended up teachin’ piano to rich and precocious children. Can’t say I earned very much doing that, though.’ She steered the empty wheelchair clear of a
bench occupied by an elderly couple who were fast asleep with legs stretched out onto the gravel pathway. ‘I suppose my job now is making sure you get better again, John.’

‘Mary?’ She sensed he had an awkward question. One he was having trouble finding the words to frame.

‘Yes?’

‘How old am I?’

‘Oh, you’re thirty-nine,’ she replied, without missing a beat.

He shrugged. ‘I thought I was much older than that. I was looking at myself in a mirror.’

‘I should say you look much younger.’

‘But you are, aren’t you? Much younger?’

She allowed herself the briefest pause, wondering how much to stretch the truth. ‘Twenty-six,’ she replied. She added just three years onto her real age. Enough to narrow the gap
between them to thirteen years. Not an implausible age difference.

‘But, I could almost be your father!’

‘You’d have to have been a very young one if so. More like an older brother.’

He nodded, then laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Us,’ he replied. ‘I’m so much older, but it’s as if
I’m
the little one, and
you’re
my older, wiser sister.’

She turned to look at him, her hand gently resting on one of his broad shoulders. ‘What a decidedly odd couple we make.’

‘T
here,’ she said. ‘Breakfast: eggs, toast and butter, and a nice strong coffee.’

Argyll looked up from the chair in the bay window. ‘Mary, thank you. Are you not having something with me this morning?’

‘I have some errands to run. Just a few things.’

He reached out and grabbed her hand. ‘You’re doing so much for me. Caring for me, cooking for me . . . I don’t know . . .’ He smiled sadly. ‘I can’t help but
wonder why such a beautiful young woman would want to spend time fussing around—’

‘Because I love you. Because you’ve got manners and graces unlike the . . .’ She was going to say unlike all the young bumerees and mug-fisted tykes that worked down
Spitalfields Market and fancied their chances with her out the back of the pub. ‘Unlike most of them young gentleman around town,’ she said instead.

Impulsively, she leant over and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Because you’re a wonderful man, John. An’ I aim to have you back with me. Now,’ she straightened up and
flourished a copy of the
Illustrated London News
, ‘you enjoy your breakfast an’ have a nice read. I’ll be back later on with some groceries an’ make us both a lovely
broth for lunch.’

She kissed the top of his head, where his coarse brown hair was still unruly and sprouted like cactus plants from a night bedevilled by tossing and turning against a feather pillow. The bandage
had gone now and the area of his scalp around the line of stitching, near his crown, was sprouting a fuzz of bristles as new hair had begun to grow in. She was going to have to take John back to
Saint Bart’s to have the stitches removed a couple of weeks from now. Dr Hart would take that opportunity to see how John’s memory was healing.

‘See you later,’ she said, stepping out of the front room and into the hall, closing the door behind her.

In the hall, another door beside the pantry stood closed. Gently, she eased it open to reveal a short, steep flight of stone steps down to the basement. She knew the basement well enough. On
more than one occasion, Mr Frampton-Parker had found reason to follow her down there while she was collecting a bucket of coals for her bedroom on the top floor.