Rose (7 page)

John Maypole’s room was near Scholes Bridge in an alley of brick walls leaning together so acutely that their rooflines almost touched. Between them a slice of gray air dropped onto Leveret and Blair. Maypole was obviously the sort of evangelist who chose to mingle with his congregation day and night, a man who was willing not only to descend to the depths but to sleep there.

Leveret opened a room furnished with bed, table and chairs, cast-iron range, chest of drawers, washbasin, chamber pot set on linoleum of a dark, indecipherable pattern. Blair lit an oil lamp hanging on the wall. Its wan illumination reached to the glory of the room, an oil
painting of Christ in a carpenter’s shop. Jesus appeared delicate and unaccustomed to hard work, and in Blair’s opinion His expression was overly abstracted for a man handling a saw. Shavings curled around His feet. Through His window was a glimpse of olive trees, thorn-bushes and the blue Sea of Galilee.

Leveret said, “We left the room as it was, in case he returned.”

A pewter crucifix hung in the center of another wall. On a shelf leaned a Bible, well-thumbed theological books and a single slim volume of Wordsworth. Blair opened the chest drawers and felt through the black woolen cassocks and suits of a poor curate.

“John wasn’t interested in material goods,” Leveret said. “He owned only two suits.”

“And they’re both here.” Blair returned to the shelf, flipped through the Bible and books and stood them upright. They stayed. They hadn’t leaned long enough for the bindings to warp. “Is anything missing?”

With a deep breath, Leveret said, “A journal. John recorded his thoughts. It’s the one item that’s gone. It was the first thing I looked for.”

“Why?”

“In case it might tell where he was going or what he was thinking.”

“Have you ever read it?”

“No, it was private.”

Blair walked around the room and to the window, which was dirty enough to serve as a shade. “Did he ever have visitors?”

“John chaired meetings here for the Explosion Fund and the Society for the Improvement of the Working Classes, not to mention the Home for Women.”

“Practically a radical.” Blair sniffed. “He didn’t smoke?”

“No, and he didn’t allow smoking here.”

“Leveret, you described yourself in your letter as not
only Maypole’s friend but his confidant. Which suggests that he confided in you. What?”

“Personal matters.”

“Do you think this is a good time to hold out, after he’s been gone for two months?”

“If I thought that the sentiments John shared with me in the intimacy of friendship had anything to do with his disappearance, naturally I would divulge them to you.”

“How intimate were you? Damon and Pythias, Jesus and John, Punch and Judy?”

“You’re trying to provoke me.”

“I’m trying to provoke the truth. The sort of saint you describe doesn’t exist. I’m not writing his tombstone, I’m trying to find the son of a bitch.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use that language.”

“Leveret, you’re a specimen, you really are.”

Even in the dusk of the room, Blair saw the estate manager’s face heat to red. He lifted the painting and felt the back of the canvas. He paced off the linoleum: ten by twenty feet, ending in walls of whitewashed brick. He touched the plaster ceiling; seven feet high in one corner, six in another. He went to the center of the room and knelt.

“Now what are you doing?” Leveret asked.

“The way Bushmen teach their children to track is to give them turtles as pets. The father releases the turtle and the child has to find it by following scratches the turtle claws make on bare rock.”

“You’re looking for scratches?”

“I was looking for blood, actually, but scratches would do.”

“What do you see?”

“Not a damn thing. I’m not a Bushman.”

Leveret pulled out his watch. “I’ll leave you now. I have to invite Reverend Chubb for tonight.”

“Why will he be there?”

Leveret answered reluctantly. “Reverend Chubb has expressed some concerns about your fitness.”

“My fitness?”

“Not your intelligence,” Leveret said quickly. “Your moral fitness.”

“Thank you. This promises to be a delightful dinner party. Will there be other guests concerned about my moral fitness?”

Leveret backed toward the door. “A few.”

“Well, I’ll try to stay sober.”

“The Bishop has faith in you.”

“The Bishop?” Blair could hardly keep from laughing.

The night before, darkness had softened the row houses on the eastern side of Scholes Bridge; now daylight and soot outlined every brick and slate. The mystery cast by gas lamps was replaced by a meanness of block after block of back-to-back construction that showed in leaning walls and the reek of privies. The daytime sound was different because women and children were in the streets and the din of their clogs on stone rang through the singsong of vendors and tinkers. Miners wore clogs, mill workers wore clogs, everyone in Scholes wore clogs. What had Rose Molyneux called Wigan? A black hole? It was a loud hole.

John Maypole had met her at the bridge. It was a logical place to follow the martyr’s steps.

It wasn’t quite the Via Dolorosa. The corner beerhouse was a parlor with long tables, barrels of beer and cider, and the commercial hospitality of pickled eggs. Blair introduced himself to the owner as Maypole’s cousin and suggested that the family would reward good information about the priest, last seen two months ago at the bridge.

The owner reminded Blair that in January dark came early. And, as the man put it, “Your Maypole might be a curate, he could be the Pope with a bell on, but unless a
man comes in with his mates for a drink he’s pretty much invisible this end of Wigan.”

A butcher’s shop looked out on the next block. The butcher was Catholic, but he recognized Maypole from rugby. He said the curate had been walking at a stiff pace with the Molyneux girl, lecturing her or being lectured by her.

“She’s a Catholic girl, she stood right up to him. It caught my eye how Maypole was pulling off his choker—you know, his ecclesiastical collar.” He paused significantly. “In a furtive manner.”

“Ah.” Blair brushed a fly away.

The fly returned to a swarm browsing on what looked like torn flannel: tripe. Pigs’ feet and black pudding lay under a glass as scummy as a pond. The butcher leaned across to whisper. “Priests are human. The flesh is weak. It never hurt a man to wet his willy.”

Blair looked around. He wouldn’t have been too surprised to see a willy or two hanging from hooks. “They looked friendly, then? I thought you said that one seemed to be lecturing the other.”

“That’s Rose, complete with thorns, as the saying goes.”

The butcher was the last person who recalled anyone resembling Maypole. These things happened in Africa, Blair thought. Missionaries vanished all the time. Why not in darkest Wigan?

He spent the afternoon asking about his missing cousin John Maypole at the Angel, Harp, George, Crown and Sceptre, Black Swan, White Swan, Balcarres Arms, Fleece, Weavers’ Arms, Wheelwrights’ Arms, Windmill, Rope and Anchor. Along the way he bought not new but old clothes from a “shoddy shop.” “Shoddy” were clothes so old they were ready to be torn up and used as fertilizer; in fact, they were more valuable as fertilizer than as clothes. Perfect miner’s clothes.

By six he was in a pub called The Young Prince. Outside, the establishment looked to be falling down. Corner bricks had dropped like rotted teeth; slate tiles had skated off the roof. Yet the interior boasted a mahogany bar, a glowing hearth and the Young Prince himself, mounted on a pedestal beside the door. The Prince was apparently a fighting dog of some renown, a bull terrier white when alive, now stuffed and turning gray with immortality.

Miners were just arriving. A few had been home, washed and returned in clean caps and white silk scarves. The majority, however, had stopped on their way from the pit to rinse their throats first. Where their caps tipped back was a peek of white skin and hairlines tattooed from coal scars; the older men smoked long clay pipes and wore scars on their foreheads as blue as Stilton cheese. Blair ordered a hot gin for his fever, which was returning in a spiteful manner, as if it had left him alone too long, and listened to arguments about racing pigeons, the decline of rugby, whether a ferret or a dog could kill more rats. This was edifying company, he thought. He had once spent a day listening to an Ethiopian describe different ways to skin and cook a snake, which was a discourse by Socrates compared with this.

This was not a job for him, he thought. He was serious with Leveret: Maypole was too opposite. How could he retrace the steps of a man who was practically a martyr? The curate was an Englishman who saw the world as a battle between Heaven and Hell, whereas he saw it as geology. Maypole thought of England as a shining lamp unto all nations, which to him was like claiming that the world was flat.

Blair became aware that he had been joined at his table by a familiar face, Mr. Smallbone from the train, except that he had traded his suit for a miner’s moleskin jacket, and a leather pouch like the kind used by bookmakers at racecourses hung from his shoulder. His prominent nose,
set off by black smudges on his cheeks, was in crimson bloom.

“I’m not drinking,” Smallbone said.

“I can see that.”

“I came in with the lads, I didn’t spend a penny, I was only being sociable. It’s a very friendly situation, The Young Prince.”

“That’s what you tell Mrs. Smallbone?”

“Mrs. Smallbone is another story.” Smallbone sighed as if his wife was a volume to herself, then brightened. “You’ve come to the right place, especially tonight. Oh, if you’d gone to The Harp.”

“I was at The Harp.”

“Irish. Is it me or is it dry in here?”

Blair caught the barman’s attention and held up two fingers.

“The fights at The Harp. Every night it’s one Irishman biting off the nose of another Irishman. They’re good men. Oh, there’s no one better for digging a hole than an Irishman. But for the day-in, day-out getting of coal there’s nothing like a Lancashireman.” Smallbone sighed as the gins arrived and took his before it hit the table. “Your Welshman, your Yorkshireman, but above all, your Lancashireman.”

“Underground?”

“So to speak. Your health.”

They drank, Blair half his glass at a go, Smallbone with a careful, parsimonious sip—a man for the long haul.

“You must have known the men who died in the fire.”

“Knew them all. Worked with them thirty years, fathers and sons. Absent friends.” Smallbone doled himself another sip. “Well, not all. There are always miners from outside Wigan. Dayworkers. You never even know their last names. If they’re Welsh you call them Taffy, if they’re Irish they’re Paddy, and if they’re missing two fingers you call them Two Pints. As long as they can get coal, that’s all that matters.”

A group of women entered. Respectable women were relegated to an area called the snug; their bustles would upset glasses if they even tried to make their way to the bar. These four, however, pushed through. Boldness was not the only difference: from the waist up they dressed in woolen head shawls and flannel shirts, but their sack skirts were rolled up to the waist like cummerbunds and sewn to stay permanently out of the way of their corduroy pants. Their hands were blue on one side, pink on the other, their faces raw and damp from washing.

The bartender didn’t seem surprised. “Beers?”

“Ales,” said the big girl with ginger hair. She told the other girls, “He’d forget his balls if they weren’t in a bag.” Her eyes roamed the pub until she noticed Blair. “You’re a photographer?”

“No.”

“I do photographs. My friend Rose and I pose in work clothes or Sunday dresses. We’re very popular.”

“Rose who?”

“My friend Rose. No artistic poses, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Blair said.

“Call me Flo.” Ale in hand, she approached his table. Her features were plain, but she had painted her lips and cheeks with enough rouge to look like a tinted photo. “You’re American.”

“You have a good ear, Flo.”

The compliment brought pink to her face. Her hair seemed to spring electrically from her shawl. She put Blair in mind of Queen Boadicea, the mad queen of the Britons who almost drove Caesar’s troops back into the sea.

She said, “I like Americans. They don’t stand on ceremony.”

“I don’t stand on any ceremony at all,” Blair promised her.

“Not like someone from London.” There was a dramatic quality to Flo; London was clearly her equivalent of a nest of lice. “Members of Parliament who want to put honest girls out of work.” Her gaze swooped down on Smallbone. “And the little arse-kissers who help them.”

Smallbone listened unprovoked, a pat of butter that wouldn’t melt in a furnace. She turned her attention back to Blair. “Could you see me in a factory? Flouncing around in a skirt, seeing to a bobbin here and a spool there? Going pale and deaf and tied to a machine? Not me. And not you, because you never see any photographers in a factory. People only want to buy pictures of women at a mine.”

A voice behind them said, “He’s no photographer.”

Blair looked up at a young miner wearing a jacket with a velvet collar and a silk scarf with brown spots. He recognized Bill Jaxon from the picture of the rugby team.

Jaxon said, “Last night he visited Rose.”

The rest of the pub was silent, a tableau. It struck Blair that Jaxon’s entrance was expected. Relished. Even the Young Prince’s glass eyes seemed to show a fresh gleam.

Jaxon said mildly, “You didn’t knock, did you? She said she was lucky to be dressed.”

“I apologized.”

Flo said, “Bill, he’s drunk. Besides, he’s got no clogs. He’d be no sport at all.”

Jaxon said, “Hush up, Flo.”

What clogs had to do with sport, Blair didn’t know.

Jaxon delivered his attention back to Blair. “You’re from the Bishop, Rose says.”

“From Reverend Maypole’s family, I heard,” Smallbone said.

“Both.”

“A distant relation?” Jaxon asked.

“Very distant.” When Blair twisted in his chair to look
up at Jaxon he had a sensation of envelopment, like a mouse in a large hand. It wasn’t comfortable. Bill Jaxon had fair features and straight dark hair, exceedingly combed, a pearly scarf tucked under a plowshare of a jaw, the sort that could make an actor’s career. Blair said, “I was asking Rose about Reverend Maypole. Weren’t you on the same rugby team?”