Edward’s mother served lemon biscuits on a plate from which the Queen’s head looked grimly out, and fretted that her son was tired. He’d been silent in such company and responded only to Martha’s quiet asides – was the old wound hurting? Could he show Spencer the plans he’d been making for a new estate? ‘Very feasible,’ Spencer had said, though really he knew nothing about it. He smoothed his hands across the length of white paper on which Edward had drafted, with all his painstaking untutored skill, the blueprint of a tenement block set around a square of garden. ‘Can I take this – can I show my colleagues? Would you mind?’
Luke meanwhile had eaten his fifth biscuit, having admired Mrs Burton’s evident attention to cleanliness, and said, ‘Martha won’t be happy until she’s seen Thomas More’s Utopia encamped on Tower Hill.’ He’d licked sugar from his thumb, and looked merrily out at the ranks of peaked roofs past the window. Writing to Cora had been like lancing a boil: in due course there might be further discomfort, but for now he felt only relief. What he’d written had been the truth, at least while he still held the pen: he expected nothing back, had offered no bargain, thought himself owed nothing. Probably the euphoria would last no more than another day, but it was a heady thing while it lasted, and made him benevolent. Sometimes, imagining a sealed envelope making its way to his door on the back of a postman’s bike, he grew anxious: would she be amused – would she be moved – might she ignore it and go on blithely as before? Knowing her, he thought the last most likely: it was difficult to penetrate her good temper, or move her beyond a general display of affection to everyone she knew.
‘Off we go then, slumming it,’ said Charles rather gleefully, putting on his coat, remembering how years before he and a companion had one night been tourists of poverty, dressing in drag and loitering under streetlights, drumming up not a solitary client between them.
‘You might be sold a bad oyster,’ said Edward Burton, not yet well enough to take up his post over at Holborn Bars, ‘but keep your wits about you and you’ll all come home again.’
As they’d left it was not yet closing time in the factories and offices, and so the alleys were rather quiet, and it was possible to make out the sound of trains shunting on the tracks a few hundred yards distant. All around, high tenements blotted out the light, and laundry hanging low above them could never have been got clean. Though the summer was mild the few scraps of sunlight coming through seemed hotter there, so that before long Martha felt her clothes grow damp between her shoulder-blades, and the pavements, slicked with fallen scraps of food, gave off the sweetish scent of decay. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sublet, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten, and strangers bickered over cups and plates and their few square feet of space. Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.
Here and there Martha saw reasons to hope that passed the others by, and sometimes nodded, and smiled, because all those strangers’ faces were familiar. A woman in a scarlet jacket appeared from behind a lace curtain to water the geraniums on her windowsill, and tossed away a couple of spent blooms that landed in the gutter beside a broken Guinness bottle. Polish labourers had come to seek work, discovering that if Dick Whittington had been misled about London’s pavements, the weather was at least more temperate in the winter and the docks never slept. They were cheerful and noisy; they leaned in doorways in pairs with their caps tipped, passing a Polish newspaper back and forth; they smoked black-papered cigarettes that gave off a fragrant pall. A Jewish family went volubly by on their way to catch a bus, and the girls wore red shoes; a moment later an Indian woman passed on the other side and in each ear was a bit of gold.
But even Martha had to concede it was frequently a miserable scene: a young mother sat on a doorstep enviously watching two children eat cheap white bread and margarine, and a group of men watched a bulldog in training for a fight hang by its jaws from a high rope. Someone had thrown aside a copy of Vanity Fair, and from the cover an actress in a yellow dress smiled placidly out; beside it in the gutter a clever-eyed rat flexed its little hands. Passing the men with their dog Martha couldn’t suppress her distaste: she glowered at them openly; a man with sleeves rolled high to show a blurred tattoo lunged at her, and laughed as she scuttled on. Luke, more familiar with the seamy city than he’d let on, a little amused by Spencer’s display of social conscience, allowed himself to grow chivalrous and walked more closely at her side.
‘Will it work? – it must work,’ she said, gesturing ahead to where Charles walked with Spencer, picking his distasteful way through a litter of rotten fruit from which a cloud of small flies puffed. ‘He must see this is unsustainable, if only out of common humanity!’
‘How can it not? Bit of a stupid man I’ve always thought, but not an unkind one – evening, love,’ he said, grinning at a woman in a curled wig who leaned invitingly out of her door and blew him a kiss as he passed.
‘It’s no use – Spencer has tried – I’m long past redemption.’ There ahead of them on the path his friend was gesticulating towards an especially narrow alley from which a sour smell came. ‘He’s doing all this mostly for your sake, you know. He’d give a fortune to a beggar if you asked him but otherwise would never notice they’re there –’
She considered denying this, but felt that what with one thing and another the Imp had earned her honesty. ‘It’s not so bad of me, is it? I’ve never promised him anything – and besides, I’m not what his family would’ve had in mind! – but I can’t do this alone. I’m a woman and a poor one – they might as well’ve cut out my tongue.’
They’d come to a kind of courtyard overlooked on all sides by tenement blocks. Luke watched his friend stand with arms folded surveying the insoluble problem of London, speaking in his quiet steady way to Ambrose, who only half-listened, distracted by a child in a fairy costume sitting on a doorstep and smoking a cigarette. ‘He has joined the Socialist League, and talks of commissioning a little something from William Morris. Martha – let him down easy, won’t you?’ The fairy child stubbed out her cigarette and began another; her wings shed a feather and shivered.
Martha, stirred with guilt, said crossly, ‘Can’t I just be friendly, and that be that? He’s not a puppet: he thinks well enough for himself, listen –’
‘All the new housing on the Thames Embankment,’ Spencer was saying, ‘that they were so proud of, and use as proof of progress: have you seen it? Little better than cages. They’re packed in there tighter than they ever were – some rooms have no windows and those that do are hardly bigger than a stamp – they wouldn’t house their hounds so badly.’ He couldn’t resist a glance at Martha, who came near and let her temper get the better of her.
‘Charles – look at you – you can’t wait to go home, to Katherine and your velvet slippers and your wine that costs more each sip than they must live on for week. You think them a different species – that they brought this on themselves because they’re immoral or stupid and that if you gave them something better they’d trash it in a week – well: perhaps they are a different animal from you, because while your kind grudge each penny of your tax, here if they had nothing they’d give you half of it – no, Luke: I won’t stop – d’you think because Cora taught me which fork to use for fish I’ve forgotten where I was born?’