White Stone Day (3 page)

'True
for you, sir,' says Weeks. 'Especially us last remaining of the 2nd
Infantry what has been dealt so poor a hand. We are not in the
running for respectable work. Yet it is not healthy for the mind, an
English girl being taken.'

'You
have seen and done worse, Mr Weeks.'

'It
is not the same, is it? Not after the 'orrors o' Bibi–Gar . .
.' The smaller man's eyes become distant; his voice starts as a
whisper but rapidly gains volume. 'English woman and children in
pieces . . . a ghastly puzzle of flesh the well full of it, white
women and children, hang the sepoy swine . . .'

'Fall
to for heaven's sake, keep your voice down and your mind on the
business at hand!' Robin swiftly produces a flask from an inside
pocket. 'Hazar, corporal, there's a tot for you.'

Weeks
drinks deep. 'Thank you, sir. Hazar yourself, sir.'

'What
you need is a bit of the chemical before lights–out. One sniff
and you sleep like a haba. It is pukka for the bowels as well.' 'That
is not the trouble, sir. It is to crush the slavers only to become
slavers ourselves – and of an English girl. I know not how to
properly confess it at church.'

'It
is not a sin, corporal. As in Bombay, it is an industry.'

'When
in Rome, I suppose, sir.'

'Precisely.
Being foreign–born, not England–born, we must adapt to
the terrain, learn to think with the mind of one's fellow Britons.
And no more of this confession business, please.'

WHITECHAPEL,
1858

Weeks
glances down at the delicate, inert form in his lap, heaves a sigh
and takes another swig from the flask. 'You 'ave a tactical mind, Mr
Robin. It is no wonder you reached the elite ranks and not I.' Thus,
the two surviving members of the 2nd Infantry Division, 3rd Infantry
Brigade, rekindle their esprit de corps.

As
India–born Englishmen, Robin and Weeks arrived in London as
destitute, unarmed and disoriented as Punjabis. For weeks, they
wandered the Embankment as in a wilderness, near starvation, with no
more understanding of the ways of London and how to survive here than
if they had landed in Timbuktu – less, for in Africa they would
at least have known how to deal with the inhabitants, to forage, to
plunder, to butcher and bolt.

Eventually
they found themselves in the cadaver business – stealing,
digging up and, in a slow period, creating corpses for private
medical schools unconnected with the Royal College, for dissection by
apprentice apothecary–surgeons. Week after week, they loitered
on the Embankment, amid the army of unemployed men who gather in
front of the warehouses of the East India Company, available for hire
by aggrieved men–about–town as man–bashers for a
few shillings.

Then,
as chance would have it, along came Mr Lush, acting on behalf of a
member of the quality, who offered them an opportunity to expand
their custom by furnishing a young female subject for 'artistic pur–
poses'. The remuneration was more than encouraging.

The
requirement was of a highly specific nature. The creature to be
obtained was described in minute detail – gender, features,
colouring, stature – as though for a part in the theatre. After
several days, the search took them to a gambling establishment in
Houndsditch, where they located the perfect specimen, and for a
breathtaking stipend. Robin removes the handkerchief from the girl's
mouth and nose. His damaged features soften as he regards her face –
the smooth English brow, the pert, pointed English chin. For a moment
the two soldiers grow sad together: on the passage from Calcutta they
imagined London as a garden, blooming with lovely faces such as this.

'She
is ready, corporal, and will easily last the trip.'

Being
the more muscular and better–sighted, Weeks lifts the small,
limp form in his arms so that Robin may open the lid of the wicker
hamper. 'Put her in the basket, Mr Weeks. She has a half–hour
to catch the Oxford train.'

The
Alhambra Baths, Endell Street

Nobody
is more squeamish about mortality than the man who courts it in his
daily habits.

Edmund
Whitty, correspondent for The Falcon, crosses Gutter Lane with a
scented scarf over his mouth and nose – for London is in the
throes of the public ordeal that will become known as the Great
Stink, when so many citizens have resorted to covering their faces
with their handkerchiefs, the city might be populated by highwaymen.

Looking
on the bright side, the Great Stink has trumped the lesser stink
emanating from Whitty himself. He has spent another night in a
doss–house on Golden Square, where anyone so foolish as to put
on a night–shirt awakens in the morning with nothing to wear,
his day– clothes having been sold twice over by dawn.

Like
any professional on his uppers, Whitty torments himself with past
success. Even the putrid air carries memories of a time when the city
rang with the Amateur Clubman's eloquent, if somewhat artificial,
indignation:

It
is an historical fact that in ancient times, the Thames functioned as
a repository of the dead not unlike the Ganges – a holy
conveyance into which one's mortal remains were consigned for their
journey to Heaven. Now the Thames is not a river of the dead but a
dead river – a boneless, swelling corpse at the heart of
Empire, a malign tumour in the heart of the greatest city in the
world . . .

The
Ganges reference was pure speculation, and 'ancient times' an
unprovable fiction, yet the piece howled with populist outrage,
putting The Falcon in the forefront of municipal reform. More
important, the piece increased circulation by 10 per cent, providing
a bonus of £i 5 for the outraged scribe.

Happy
days. Happier than now, at any rate.

Weighted
with nostalgia (and the suspicion that he has become that
much–to–be–pitied figure among Oxford men, the
'burnt–out case'), Whitty slouches down Tavistock Street past
buildings like monstrous blocks of cured meat.

He
was on top of the Thames scandal from the beginning. If England were
a meritocracy by this point he would now be serving as an adviser to
Parliament, spreading insight among the highest circles, at
favourable rates.

Following
the cholera epidemic of 1847, the Commission of Sewers decreed that
all sewage be discharged directly into the drains. Henceforth, the
daily excretions of over three million people fell into the pipes
below, wound through a succession of infested tunnels, then
reconvened in the Thames, from which Londoners drank, washed and
fished.

A
decade later, the Thames is a boneless, rotting corpse and so is his
career, having failed to generate one saleable narrative in over two
months – not through lack of industry, but because each piece
has been usurped by Alasdair Fraser's most detested rival, the
correspondent for Dodd's.

To
be scooped, spoiled, ruined by Fraser? The deuce!

A
trickle of sunlight seeps through the iron skeleton of what will
become the rebuilt Theatre Royal, which could be named the Royal
Tinderbox for its proclivity to go up in flames. Whitty estimates the
hour to be seven – he no longer has a watch. Still, his habit
of early rising endures, unaffected by a pathetic lack of stimulants.
Though he appears as stylishly ravaged as ever, Whitty is a mere husk
of his normal self, having retained the form of decadence but not the
content. Yet it could be worse. It is late summer, and he has not yet
slept on a swarming straw mattress with a half–dozen naked,
diseased strangers. Mind, the doss–house on Golden Square was a
frightful place. Bodily sounds that would make a celibate of anyone.
And vermin? Before retiring, he managed to scrape a small handful of
crab–lice from the bedclothes, and crushed beneath the
candlestick like peppercorns. Surely this degraded state of affairs
cannot owe itself to the skill of Fraser of Dodd's! When a pugilist
suffers defeat at the hands of an opponent, the fault lies in his own
art. Whitty is losing confidence, like a man with a terrible blemish
on his face, yet, lacking a mirror, and at a loss to see it for
himself.

He
remembers once having seen a street performer on the Strand, a
survivor of brain surgery able to detach his skull at the crown like
the lid of a jam–jar, exposing the sphere of gelatinous flesh
within. For a penny, he invited pedestrians to press upon one or
another part of his brain with a forefinger, causing him to cry out,
to laugh, or to flap an arm up and down. Whitty had recoiled from the
spectacle; yet should he not envy a man with access to the inner
workings of his own mind?

While
awaiting the insight that will restore his prospects, one imperative
exists: to avoid emitting the odour of failure. For a journalist,
failure is like gangrene. As with vomit and shit, failure can be
detected in minute quantities. Once a journalist exudes failure, the
stench is with him for life.

Until
recently, the Turkish bath has occupied an unsavoury niche in the
city, a virtual secret to all but a scattering of patrons: officers
returned from Turkey and northern Africa, sufferers of joint pains,
neuralgia and delirium tremens, as well as a certain set of Mayfair
clubmen who use the baths as a meeting–place, with less than
salubrious objectives in mind.

For
his part, Whitty has come to rely upon the Alhambra as his cocoon –
his place of transformation from worm to butterfly, without which he
might as well burrow a hole in the ground and die.

Entering
the establishment through an inconspicuous door marked 'Employees and
Trade', he steps into a tiny vestibule suitable for the shedding of
unwanted identities.

First
go the gloves – once fawn, now black, tattered and melancholy
beyond expression. Next the wool overcoat – once green, now the
colour and texture of tree bark. Layers of filthy linen follow, and a
pair of boots for which the term 'down at the heel' is no longer
sufficient, there being no heel left to speak of. Lastly, his woollen
underpants, now a leaden grey as though painted by the London fog.
Having traded his mortifying attire for an equally mortifying
exposure of his most private parts, Whitty scurries quickly through
the entry–way and down a hall to a booth, whose indifferent
occupant hands him a pair of checked towels, the larger of which he
fastens about his loins like a kilt.

At
last he can face the world, unashamed.

Padding
barefoot across the damp ceramic tiles, he passes through a wide
archway into a marble sitting room, where five or six foppish
gentlemen lean against the sweating porcelain walls, smoking
cigarettes. He is shocked but not surprised to recognise Walker of
the Treasury, whose checked towel trails across the tiles as though
inviting someone to snatch it. Walker and Whitty exchange perfunctory
nods and avert their gaze, while the former reddens like a tomato
from head to toe.

Hurrying
through a second door into the baths, he passes by a tall, angular
gentleman with a T–shaped moustache and goatee. American
without a doubt: the colonial tourist is an increasing phenomenon in
town, buying up ancient furniture and cluttering the landmarks of the
city.

In
this torpid atmosphere he perches on a marble armchair to await the
cleansing process; around him other gentlemen lie face–down on
stone couches shaped like crypts. Silent eastern boys slide like ice–
skaters across the tiles, appearing and disappearing as though
materialised from steam, ministering to the wattles, bristles and
appendages like attendants to a herd of walrus.

'Salaam,
Mr Whitty, you honour our house with your presence.' The voice is a
modulated oriental murmur, with no hint of the street in Cheapside
where Ahmed, son of the proprietor, was actually born. 'And to you,
Ahmed. Is your father well?' asks Whitty, stretching out naked on the
bench so that the two might perform their respective functions –
the mortician and the cadaver.

'In
the pink, praise God.'

After
soaking him with tepid water, Ahmed scrubs each square inch of skin
clean by means of a soap–infused sponge on the end of a stick,
much as he might wash the windows of a house. Then he gently scrapes
Whitty down, from his neck (chafed) to his heels (blistered), using
an instrument resembling a small garden hoe. As he planes off the
dross, an extraordinary pile of debris accumulates, though it has
been less than a week since his last visit. Last, Ahmed's glistening,
hairless colleague appears in a loincloth to crack every bone in
Whitty's skeleton, knead his muscles, and pinch his toes.

Having
completed what is known as 'the sudation', the two attendants
silently withdraw, leaving the corpse in a state of languid
reflection. Whitty refuses to put his current misfortune to some sort
of curse – though it is true that much of his life has been a
matter of fleeing an accelerating train, with varying distances
between his rump and the cow–catcher. Even at the height of his
success there remained his fearsome debt to the Captain, the result
of a wager in the sport of ratting, with compound interest growing
like a tumour and default a mathematical certainty.