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imagined. There were photographs and miniature portraits on side tables of
mutton-chopped high guildsmen whom she claimed to be close relatives. If
Mistress Bowdly-Smart, previously Stropcock, was to be believed, she and her
husband had, if anything, descended from far greater heights to end up living
here in Fitzroy Street. It was clever
to twist the past so far around that even I, who knew the truth of it, found
myself lost and wondering in this over-crowded room.
The other guests cast me nibbling glances as they sipped their tea and talked
of the evening ahead. A fire raged in the hearth, but a chill fog of
anticipation slowly began to gather over the gilt and crystal. Mister
Snaith looked weirdly at home. Ever the professional, he shuffled about in his
reversed green and orange cloak with his toupee off, his pointed face at
almost the same height as those of the seated chattering guildmistresses. He
flashed the tattooed patch on his powdered left wrist, then snatched it
quickly away. He laid his bird-fingers on the hands of each of them, and made
soft murmurings close to their ears. Whatever it was he said to each of them,
they all seemed changed by it. Perhaps, I
thought, some final mystery really would be revealed tonight just as he always
seemed to promise, although, knowing what I now did, I very much doubted it.
`Well? Shall we begin?'
The maids extinguished the lanterns, and we fellow seekers sat at an empty
circular table at the far end the darkened room, away from the glow of the
fire which pulsed and glimmered across the glass and metalwork, turning the
whole place into a strange, exotic cave. Mister
Snaith sat alone at the furthest, darkest end; he was so small on his chair
that little more than his head, disembodied, dimly reflected, seemed to hover
above its polished surface. The rest of us held hands, which was an odd
sensation in itself, to feel the nails and rings tensing, the surges of sweat
and chill. I had come here as colluder and sceptic, but the atmosphere in that
coalescing darkness was earnest.
As Mister Snaith's breathing grew ragged, the questions were of young Master
Owen, who'd fallen under the ice whilst skating twenty years before, and of
baby Clark, who had lived for six short happy hours. A whispering chorus of
lost suitors and dead children, the missing and the stillborn, gathered around
these grieving women as they sat around that table with Mister Snaith. I'm not
sure quite how he managed on his own when I, or that long-lost cabsman, wasn't
with him, but, even though I understood some of his trickeries, a chill fell
upon me and I felt myself thinking of my own losses, and poor Maud, and
especially of my mother. I'd placed the carpetbag on the precise spot he'd
instructed just beneath the table where he could reach it with his tiny foot.
But the cottony stuff which emerged, the tinsel and the phosphorus and the
rubber balls you squeezed to make sounds, even the vague words which he spoke
in many cracked and croaking voices
I understood now that all of these things were incidental to the real purpose
of such gatherings as this. These guildswomen hardly needed
Mister Snaith. His tricks and preposterous claims were incidental. They made
their own magic, and it came from the loss in their hearts and the want of not
knowing; it came from the cheek unkissed and the thing not done or said, or
said once and regretted forever.
`He'll never leave London, will he?' Maud had her best hat crammed down on her
head as she stood outside our latest tenement.
Wiry, mist-beaded spills of her hair stuck out from all sides of it like
tangles of spiderweb. She gave me a bright, frail smile. `All these years of
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big talk, those stupid drawings. And look where we still are ..
`These relatives of yours are you still sure?'
`Can't be any worse than this, can it? I suppose they're guilty about those
years ago when they should have helped my mother.'
Then her carriage arrived, although it was really just a wagon pulled by an
elderly dray, and Saul emerged from wherever it was that he'd been pretending
to keep busy at and helped Maud stack the few belongings she was taking with
her.
`No, no. Just wait there! Leave it all to me.'
`I'm not an invalid, Saul. God knows, I've lifted enough heavy things in my
life.'
But Saul, as ever, was struggling to be the gentleman. He'd even dusted off
one of his best waistcoats.
`And you'll write as soon as you get there? I mean, Kent's not so very far?'
But Kent might as well have been on the other side of the moon on that day.
Some distant relatives of Maud's had a farm there, and had written to say they
needed help. Maud was taking a risk by going there, but then, as she'd said to
Saul often enough in the quiet that had fallen between them now that they'd
stopped arguing, she was taking an even bigger one by staying on in London
and, after all, she was sick of the place.
The same faces as ever, the old women, the scabby, furtive children, the
distracted mothers who now mostly took care of their own babies, came out into
Thripp Street to watch Maud's departure. Some of them were crying, but that
made it easier for me not to, and for Saul to put on a brave face. But for the
mist, Maud's features were dry and distracted as well as she kissed Saul and
hugged me. In her mind, I
thought as the driver cracked his whip and we watched the tarpaulined rear of
the carriage jostle off and disappear into the grey, she left us long ago, on
Butterfly Day.
I received a message from Highermaster George a term or so later.
It was written in a flowing hand on expensive paper, and contained all the
usual if you don't minds and most exceptionally gratefuls that his kind have
drummed into them at school, although the tone was somehow desperate.
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