Jack Maggs (16 page)

34

MARY OATES WAS MOST surprised to hear her husband’s footsteps on the stair, and learn that he was off to Brighton to write about the recent fire. She should not have been surprised. Money was a subject always on his mind. One can see the evidence on all his manuscripts—their margins marked with calculations headed
£—s—d
.

Tobias Oates knew exactly the price of pork and bacon. He knew how much they owed the butcher, the grocer, the tailor. When he caught the Mail Coach at St Martin ’le Grand, he had planned his costs and revenues as carefully as the owner of a factory. On his return from Brighton he intended to sit inside and write through the night with candles burning, but as the coach rattled out of London, he was alone atop—tuppence ha’penny the mile, half the cost of being inside.

By Clapham Common, there was a light drizzle. Toby wrapped himself inside his Petersham coat, turned up his velvet collar and stared ahead into the wet dark, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing. The horses’ hooves rang. The harnesses rattled. He added the unpaid accounts from the plumber, the boot-makers, the stationer. Glimpsing the terrifying size of the totals, he then hid certain larger debts from himself, either setting them aside or putting them against possible windfalls.

On the credit side he entered the value of the painting his father had stolen: ten guineas. To this, he added a further sum of fifty pounds, this being payment for the unwritten story of Jack Maggs.

While it was true that he had never been paid so large a sum for any piece of writing, and that as yet he had no actual drama for his Magsman to act out, he was emboldened by the hard ache behind his eyes. He knew this pain of old. It was the exact same sensation he had when he first glimpsed the comic figure of old Captain Crumley. It was the distinct twinge behind the eyes, the tension in the tendons of the hands. When he entered the soul of Jack Maggs, it was as if he had entered the guts of a huge and haunted engine. He might not yet know where he was, or what he knew, but he felt the power of that troubled mind like a great wind rushing through a broken window pane.

Dawn found his eyes resting on the soft green of the Sussex Downs, but his thoughts were still inward. So immersed was he in this hidden landscape that by the time the coach horses were changed at the Half Moon, his eyes, despite the early hour, were bright and hard and alive with calculation.

In this way he continued all the way down to Brighton, and when he finally arrived at the Old Ship Inn he was inhabiting a kind of trance which he could not totally abandon. He took a cab directly to Hawke & Sons, the undertakers in Gibbons Lane.

While other writers might have begun to report the tragedy from the site of the fire, or from the bed-sides of surviving children, Tobias chose to begin his inquiries in a mortuary. As to why this was, he could not have told you, although it was doubtless anchored somewhere in his habit of confronting the things he feared the most, which pigeon-hole would, by the by, accommodate his fascination with Jack Maggs.

The death of children had always had a profound effect on him. When the young victims were also the children of poverty, it produced in him a considerable rage, which the editor of the
Chronicle
had reason to expect would be much to the newspaper’s benefit. For Tobias had been a poor child too, and he was fiercely protective of abused children, famously earnest in defence of the child victims of mill and factory owners.

In Brighton, where a cheap-jack builder had laid a gas line to murderous effect, it now took no more than a touch of the undertaker’s hand to bring all his passions to the surface.

“You wish to view the deceased?” asked the younger Mr Hawke. He was a tall sandy-haired fellow whose turned-down mouth expressed his habitual disapproval of the living. “You wish to physically inspect them?”

“Yes. I will leave it to
The Times
to describe the damage to the hospital,” said Tobias Oates. “I am sure their man is already kicking round the ashes as we speak.
The Times
has not been here, I warrant.”

“No, Sir.”

“The
Observer
?”

“You are the first to think of such a thing.”

“I have come to write about the children, Mr Hawke. I warrant I will be the only one.”

Mr Hawke turned his back and opened a chapel-like doorway through which he poked his beakish nose. “Mr Threadle,” he called. “Corporation key!”

An elderly gentleman shuffled out holding a large brass key which Mr Hawke took from him. Without speaking a word to Tobias, Mr Hawke then walked out of the office. It took a moment for the writer to realize that he was being invited on an expedition. He therefore followed Hawke’s high stooped back out into a lane-way, and thence into a smaller lane, and thence into an alley. He could smell a peculiar sweet smoke in the air but, the dull red walls about him being high, he had no way of knowing if it was the hospital he could smell or something far more innocent. Finally, they entered a narrow cul-desac and addressed a heavy door which, after some jerking, answered to the brass key. They proceeded immediately down some worn stone steps where the light was poor, and the air damp and very earthy.

They came to a small wooden vestibule and from thence passed into a very large and vaulted basement. Tobias was to learn later that it was the basement underneath the Town Hall, but at the time it felt as if he were in a catacomb. His emotions were stirred by what he saw—achingly small coffins, spaced at regular intervals on the uneven brick floor.

Mr Hawke bent over the first coffin. “There,” was all he said, but when he turned towards the writer his face revealed considerable feeling.

Tobias kneeled beside the coffin. It was a little girl, no more than eight, with a small posy of bluebells clasped in her hands.

“Suffocated,” said the undertaker.

Her eyes were closed, but even so, Mr Hawke had managed to give the dead girl an alert and very grown-up manner.

“You would not recognize them,” he said angrily. “They ain’t nothing like what they was when first I got them.”

The coroner’s report said her name was Mavis Crofts, an orphan, and she lay there in her little box with all the solemnity of a matron at the communion rail. Tobias felt a burning behind his eyes. As he steeled himself to describe this determined little face, all the fierce subterranean passion which had accompanied his journey to Brighton suddenly found a home in the mortuary.

“This is murder,” he declared.

Mr Hawke nodded fiercely, and then turned to a single coffin which, unlike the others, was covered with a white muslin cloth.

“We may best pass over Thomas Griff, Sir.”

Tobias stared down at the muslin, the same material as Lizzie’s night gown.

“It weren’t just the smoke, Sir.”

“Lift the cloth, Mr Hawke.”

“You don’t need to see it, Mr Oates.” Mr Hawke folded his hands across his chest.

Tobias reached out his hand towards the cloth. The muslin felt exactly as it did when it clothed his sister-in-law’s young body. He pulled it aside, and thereby confronted a sight so unnatural that he did not at first comprehend what it was that he was looking at. It was a human being, wet, bubbled, like meat, the blue-white bones broken through the charred and blistered skin.

“Oh my dear Lord!” He turned away, distressed, his hand across his mouth.

“Thomas Griff,” said Mr Hawke. “Carpenter’s apprentice. He was a father to his young brother.”

“Dear God,” said Tobias Oates, resting his forehead against the cold damp brick of the nearest wall. “Dear Lord forgive them all.”

Mr Hawke replaced the muslin cloth. He walked past the writer and opened the door to the street.

“You’d do better to see the correspondence at the corporation,” he said when Tobias had joined him in the lane-way.

“Correspondence?”

“The matron wrote many letters about the gas. You might look back to the second of January.”

Tobias wrote
January 2, 1837
in his notebook, but in his mind’s eye he still saw poor Thomas Griff—the black skin, the horrid blue-white of the bone. He bid the undertaker good-bye and walked directly to the site of the fire. There, in the company of a young constable, he spent an hour tracing the path of the gas line. He went next to the offices of the corporation, and inspected the matron’s correspondence. By three o’clock he had returned to the site, this time in the company of the head of the building firm responsible for the leaking gas line. Thomas Griff’s body was before him all the time, and he interrogated the builder in the smoking ruin until both their shoes were smouldering.

He interviewed the weary red-eyed nurses. He collected stories about the children who had died. He brought boiled sweets to the survivors who had been evacuated to St Stephen’s church hall. Here he produced pennies from behind ears and made a scarf appear inside a patient’s sling. He was a good magician, and would have entertained them longer had his attention not been distracted by a weary young resident who was obviously waiting for him to finish. This was Dr McAlpine, a Scot. He had been sent to ask the writer if he would please be the guest of the hospital doctors at dinner.

Tobias did not hear him. He stared at the distressed young resident, but it was poor Thomas Griff’s face he saw.

God save him,
this
was how Jack Maggs would end. He did not know how he knew this, or why this appalling spectre forced itself into his mind.

“Doubtless it’s been a hard day for you, too,” said the doctor. He placed his hand comfortingly on Tobias’s shoulder, and a fire exploded in the writer’s mind. “Unless you have another obligation?”

Tobias’s freckled eyes stared back at his questioner, but he saw instead this horrifying vision: Jack Maggs trapped inside his burning house, a whirl of fire blazing all about him.

“No, no,” he stammered. “Not at all.”

He turned away and watched the disturbed beetles and spiders running away across the burning floor. He had glimpsed the ending of his book.

35

THE READER OF TOBIAS OATES’S novels will be well aware of the role of doctors in his work: how time and time again they betray his heroes, abandon them, act snobbishly and capriciously towards the poor. None of this can prepare us for the fact that when Tobias finally realized he was being invited to dine with surgeons, and that these distinguished men not only knew his name but were professed admirers of his comic novel, he immediately decided that he was too exhausted to travel back to London until the morrow.

Of course this meant that he would lose a good four hours of labour, but while this would have been unthinkable only that morning, it did not seem to matter to him now. He would take the dawn mail. He would lodge at the Ship Inn. He sponged his own shirt collar so he would not have to tip the maid.

It was spring, the evening fine and clear. He might have breathed in the ozone on the esplanade, but instead he lazed inside his hotel room, hands clasped in his lap. He gazed out of the window at the lane-way, occupied with no other labour than a vague and pleasant daydream of his ultimate success.

At five minutes past the appointed hour, he presented himself at the imposing doors of the Hippocratic Institute. He was greeted by a butler and then relegated to a footman. As he followed this ornate fellow up the wide marble staircase he caught his own reflection in a mirror and wondered if he had been mistaken in accepting the invitation. He was bright, but rumpled, sponged, but damp. The left side of his jacket sagged with the weight of his note book.

A door opened before him. He entered a grand room whose high-arched windows afforded a view of the grey silky sea. Here he discovered eight elegantly dressed gentlemen waiting for him. Those with knighthoods wore the ribbons of their rank.

They were taller than he was. They had been to Oxford and Cambridge, had grown up with Greek and Latin, with Plato and Aristotle. And if they had admired their guest’s novel, they were obviously having great difficulty accepting that this was the same chap who used the English language like a lyre. He felt their disappointment even as he shook their hands.

Sir Stephen Wall later wrote a memoir in which he recalled the evening, particularly how the “red-lipped Cockney” had sat at table and cleaned his cutlery with his napkin. Sir Stephen describes how Tobias repeatedly rearranged his wine glass, his water glass, every single piece of cutlery, “thereby presenting himself to Medicine as a sufferer from neurasthenic agitation.”

Yet if Tobias felt momentarily disadvantaged, he would not be cowed. He solemnly gazed upon the surgeons, one by one, as if he had been appointed to sit in judgment on them. There had been a long tense moment when first he took his place at table but then, without preamble, he began to tell the story of a chance meeting with Mr Thackeray. The tale went against him quite considerably, though it soon had his audience laughing very merrily.

Next he introduced them to Percy Buckle. He gave them the fried fish, the “Great Good Fortune,” the mewling cats twining round the dinner guests’ legs, the pair of footmen with their yellow livery. He gave them, in the rough, a draft of that piece which was later so often anthologized: “A Grocer in Great Queen Street.”

By then the wine had done its work, and they became, altogether, as rowdy a group as students on the last day of term. Tobias ate roast beef pooled in blood. It was very tasty. He said so.
Tasty
was too low a word. He feared it revealed too much of his childhood, of his mother’s bread and dripping sandwiches. But when he saw his hosts were charmed completely, he glowed within the enclosure of their love.

As the custard boat was passed around, Dr McAlpine revealed to the company that, last winter at the Orpheum in London, he had seen Tobias Oates play the part of that preposterous saw-bones Sir Spencer Spence. The resident was able to recall several of his lines.

In fact he chose the only lines which Toby himself had not written. But this was not exactly literature in any case, merely a sketch in which he had parodied the manners of the Regency Surgeon Sir Herbert Catswaler.

Now, in Brighton, at the end of this long disturbing day, he was pleased to put all of his energy into “doing” the entire part for the assembled doctors.

He began, at first, with the voice alone, using no more props than a pudding spoon and a glass of port, but soon the pompous old wind-bag had a life of his own, and he was waddling up and down the room, grilling the surgeons, abusing them as “damned wretches” and “dunderheads.”

My God he made them laugh and roll about in their seats, and even the most proper of them, a very tall and sallow gentleman named Pepperidge, laughed so much that his beard was soon wet with tears.

For three hours Tobias felt prosperous, wise, celebrated. Then, a little before midnight, the surgeons rode off into the night, and all the writer’s well-being evaporated.

He stood on the footpath outside the Hippocratic Institute and suddenly saw that he had not behaved like a man of letters but like a common conjurer, a street magician. Would Thackeray have acted thus? Never.
Never
. He had been Jeremiah Stitchem, Billy Button, taking sixpences from the footmen on Blackfriars Road. He was Toby Oates, son of John Oates, a well-known scoundrel.

He walked first along the promenade and felt the clean salt air in his face, but then he took himself back to the Ship Inn and, with an unseasonable fire built for him in the little room, he set out to cleanse himself completely, to make himself everything that he had so far failed to be. He closed his eyes, contorted his face. He was not vulgar; he was not a buffoon. He took his quill once more unto the well.