Downriver (31 page)

An area of furious cross-hatching spreads like a stain from the knees of the Gentleman in White to Alice's hooped stockings, tracing the undisguised coastline of Africa. The Guard, in his salvationist's peaked cap, is travestied as ‘Dr Livingstone'. He sweeps the hot plains with his binoculars, eager to be confirmed in his latest identity by a wave from Henry Stanley. His concentration falters and the sharp lines begin to swim. The pale windows re-form as a lantern-skull, above the pithecanthropic jaw of Africa. It is the voodoo idol from
King Kong
: the binoculars are the eyes that pin Alice to her seat, where she calmly awaits her poisoned kiss of fate. In the tight square of sky behind the Guard, a black gull drifts, a swerving
V
, hinting that the river is close at hand, accomplice to the whole affair. Tenniel's carriage is located: I am sitting in it, holding it down. The moment of risk is eternally imminent.

But all of us, puppets and audience, are dominated – transfixed – by the mongoose-will of the blonde girl. Self-contained, she sits as if she were attending a lecture, with slides, on Faraday's electro-magnetic current, or the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. She has sunk into a cataleptic trance: the other figures are flattened projections, beings lifted from a magic lantern account of the ‘news'. They are icons from an historico-mythical matrix: Disraeli, Livingstone – and the High Church Goat, an Oxford man, about to embark on some Anglo-Catholic schism. Alice can cancel them all, reassert the sanctity of the carriage, travel alone. They are shadows. She indulges their whim of travelling incognito, outside their public personae; swimming in the flow of time; gathering strength in some primitive, but decently padded, orgone accumulator.

Only the
anima
of this girl can lift the train from its rails. It is like the will of my daughter, of all daughters: mothers of daughters. The ghost-conductor inspects Alice three times: through the telescope of lust, the microscope of investigation, the opera glass of envy. She allies herself with the order of birds; a feather grows from her severe black torque. She is handless, like the Goat, hiding within a live muff, a hideous dog-thing. A handbag, that classic fetish, rests beside her. It is independent, surgically detached; no relation to Wilde's capacious theatrical prop. The effect is elegantly pornographic: furs, purses, unbound hair.

Carroll closes his account (which should be published in the
Notable British Trials
series) with a revealing fugue. Dr Freud revolves his cigar. ‘
In another moment she felt the carriage rise straight up into the air, and in her fright she caught at the thing nearest to her hand, which happened to be the Goat's beard
.' After this the exhausted author expires in a milky spurt of typographic stars. Fourteen of them, arranged in groups of five, Aleister Crowley's ‘averse pentagram': numbered, perhaps, to indicate the desired age of the heroine. And, as with Hitchcock, only blondes need apply.

Beyond the author's phallocentric seizure is another interesting question: why does Tenniel make it perfectly clear in his version
that the Goat's beard is far from ‘the thing nearest to her hand'? Carroll's leap at priapic occultism is not tolerated by the illustrator – who is playing an entirely different game. He is playing detective. I believe that he codes his etching with the solution to the railway murders that had not,
as yet
, been committed; but which we can now unravel on his behalf.

The first suspect is traditionally the man in uniform, the Guard; a faceless voyeur, a wolf in wolf's clothing. He watches everything, has access everywhere; can pick his victims from deserted platforms, or use his pass key to enter locked compartments. But the evidence against him is all circumstantial. The stern
V
of his elbow signifies kinship with the flight of gulls: but that was another country and another crime. The four birds
are
implicated, but not in this affair. Tenniel keeps his establishment hitman (another Netley) outside the carriage; links him to the river.

Then what about the sinister ‘gentleman dressed in white paper', who leans forward to whisper confidingly in Alice's ear, ‘
Take a return ticket every time the train stops
'? He is eager to prolong the encounter; ‘busy' beneath the folds of his newspaper, but that is as far as it goes. He is, I'm afraid, out of stock, standard issue, the Levantine red herring. He will soon undergo a sex change and donate his albino wrappings to Wilkie Collins (inadvertently founding the English Murder Mystery). For the moment, he is no more than Peter Lorre lost inside Sidney Greenstreet's Hong Kong-stitched castoffs. We can dismiss him with a caution.

The Goat also plays with our prejudices. Tenniel, in giving him no hands, signals his innocence. He claims to have dozed through the whole thing. He is cancelled by rapid horizontal strokes of the pen; cast into the river with the other fall-guys. His name goes into the files of the Black Museum, along with his spectacles, his cufflinks, and his wing-collar. After a decent interval, he will be ‘fingered' by Colin Wilson – as a blood-guzzling ritualist. His horns will be mounted on the wall of
Donald Rubelow's office. His ‘suicide' will close the case. The pebbles from his pocket will be returned to the proper authorities.

We are left, once again, with the classic Agatha Christie railway solution:
they orl dunit
. Railways beget conspiracies: Ethel Lina White's
The Wheel Spins
(filmed by Hitchcock as
The Lady Vanishes
), with nuns in high heels, injections, bandages; or Patricia Highsmith's smoking-car collaborators, exchanging crimes (also translated by Hitchcock, with the ‘help' of Raymond Chandler); or so many more of the ‘Master's' nightmares from the first
Thirty-nine Steps
to
North by Northwest
. This man, a true son of Wanstead, must be pulled in for questioning. Tenniel's dark frame is a trailer for
Rear Window
. And we have established by now that being dead is no excuse at all.

In making his drawing look so much like a
film noir
production still is Tenniel telling us something? He makes us consider the role of Lewis Carroll as a compulsive photographer of nymphets. He reminds us that Carroll's text is an elaborate chess game: ‘
the final “checkmate” of the Red King will be found, by any one who will take the trouble to set the pieces and play the moves as directed, to be strictly in accordance with the laws of the game
'. There are no counterfeit tricks: follow Carroll's moves closely enough and he reveals his own guilt, as we all do. He plays the self-inquisitor, employs whimsy, teasing so savagely that he bruises his flesh. He has the arrogance to scatter incriminating messages he is sure we will be too stupid to interpret.

Have other ‘psychic detectives' penetrated this mystery years before us? The only crimes worth solving are the ones that have not yet been committed: they are still formally immaculate. William Hope Hodgson narrates his ‘Carnacki the Ghost-finder' tales through the medium of his own ‘Late Watson'; a narrative ‘I' who is unmasked as ‘Dodgson' (Charles Lutwidge, perhaps? Author of
Phantasmagoria and Other Poems
: the ‘real' Lewis Carroll) in
The Gateway of the Monster
. The supernumerary trio of disciples who attend Carnacki's ‘evenings' are frequently named: Arkright, Jessop, Taylor (Science, Cricket, Neo-Platonism?) –
but ‘Dodgson' is, I believe, mentioned in only two tales; ‘The Gateway of the Monster' and ‘The Hog' (which did not feature as part of the original Carnacki canon, and was not included in the wrappered summary of 1910, nor the Eveleigh Nash collection of 1913). ‘Dodgson' reports the adventures (fantastic-domestic survivals from the Looking-glass World), but – unlike Dr Watson – he is never a participant. Both these men are, of course, the true authors: they are able safely to share the terrors no outside agency has invoked. ‘
Some evening I want to tell you about the tremendous mystery of the Psychic Doorways. In the meantime, have I made things a bit clearer to you, Dodgson
?'

Tenniel, like Walter Sickert with the Ripper murders, mistook his own obsessions for guilt. He invented elaborate fables to account for his involvement
in the knowledge
of these terrible sacrifices. Sir John, it should be remembered, joined the staff of
Punch
in 1851, and produced, after the death of Leech, its principal weekly political cartoon. Now look again at the artist's heraldic sigil in the bottom left-hand corner of ‘Alice in the Train'. It is exactly the same as the initials you will find imposed in the same position in that most famous of all ‘Ripper' icons: ‘The Nemesis of Neglect' (the hooded, knife-wielding spectre with CRIME printed on its forehead). Sir John Tenniel was responsible for both images. (A ‘lost' word – part-rune, part-mirror script – is buried on the floor beneath Alice's feet: like the whispers on the dead track at the finish of the
Sergeant Pepper
LP.)

The collaboration with Carroll, and the production of this clairvoyant illustration gave Tenniel the chance to accuse the killer, whose identity he knew – because he had,
at some level
, shared in the crime. His capped (or crowned) Guard wears the Diamond and stares, eyeless, at the girl: because he is, or stands for, the
Red King
. He is checkmated. The Goat accuses him, a Tarot Devil, representing ‘ravishment, force, fatality'. So Tenniel is able to put into his depiction of Alice the details of the murders that the police have never made public. The hands of the victims were always tied in front of them – as Alice's are, within her
muff. They were all strangled with a knotted scarf, such as the one that Alice wears.
And a single feather was knotted into their hair
. I rest my case.

But wait a minute: didn't Joblard procure a quantity of these same gulls' feathers for his installation in the London Fields gallery? I must check the files. Yes, it's there in the
Flash Art
review: ‘From the dereliction of the East End one passes into the labyrinthine interior and then via a metal staircase (under each step of which a feather has been placed – the Angel's wing of ascension) to the threshold…' The feather or quill is an obvious invocation of the idea of ‘inscription', with its darker twin – confession. Joblard is the guilty man: the Bird-Revenger.

No, no, no. It's worse than that: if the details of the murders have never been made public –
how do I know what they are
? I put up my hand, confess. The relief! In the end every writer confesses. It proves nothing; a kind of boast. I must draw on the anger of women to escape from this quilted cage, a strength we will never understand, and transcribe as ‘will', ‘stubbornness', or some other biological imperative.

I allow the conceit of my house to form around me: the armour plating of an insect-samurai. I can stick the Tenniel postcard, with a stub of sugar-free gum, on to the window of the phoney carriage – and walk out, be somewhere else. That is the power of the narrator. I need to consult
The Crystal Cabinet
of Mary Butts, and I climb the rackety ladder into the attic, to search for it. (‘
The equivocal nature of the contact between visible and invisible, the natural order and the supernatural
.')

I sit in a hutch of darkness, holding a torch, illicitly leafing through John Symonds's account of Mary Butts visiting Crowley at Cêfalu, the Abbey of Thelema. The Great Beast offered Butts ‘cakes of light' – the Host, in the form of ‘a goat's turd on a plate'. Which she, unceremoniously, declined.

I am walled in by cases of books (unsold stock, forgotten purchases) that will only be read by torchlight. Extracts. Quotations. Specimen sentences questing for meaning. Any one of
them could alter the balance of the tale, and postpone that hideous moment of silence – when your turn at the fireside is concluded; the audience demand that you sit down. (
Just a moment more
.)

This awkward space has none of the spontaneous chaos of Rodinsky's room. It contains all the material that no longer fits into our lives: clothes we do not wear, letters we shall never again read, cricket bats with lumps knocked out of them. I was finally able to suspend my unfocused quest when I came upon a drawing book in which my daughter, aged about three and a half, had executed a sequence of curious sketches, featuring bubble-headed, tendril-writhing figures. Her mother then took down the child's terse ‘explanations' on the opposite leaf. The point was that the illustrations preceded the stories, and explained the unexplainable – only because her mother expected it. The child was perfectly capable of obliging some formal requirement, and ‘doing her own thing' at the same time.

What interested me, in my present state of compulsive associationism, about these Rorschach doodles was that several of the ‘stories' concerned railways. Two of these followed each other, but were not necessarily connected. ‘
The lady walked down the track. The train came and ran her over, but she got up. And she took the baby home
.' Then came a hot whirlwind, a vortex of crayoned blues and greens – on the perimeter of which was a pink blob; invertebrate, with dangling, threadlike legs. ‘
The water dripped on the lady's hand and made her die. The candle showed her the way in the dark
.'

I could let it go; leave it here with this marvellous soup of worms. By the restored power of the child's ‘candle' I could pluck a book from the sack, some forgotten favourite, and carry it back down into the electric house. Kafka's
Trial
. The brutal termination of Joseph K. that I had chosen to suppress.

‘But the hands of one of the partners were already at K.'s throat, while the other thrust the knife into his heart and turned it there twice. With failing eyes K. could still see the two of
them, cheek leaning against cheek, immediately before his face, watching the final act. “
Like a dog
!”
he said
: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.'