Arrowood. Mick Finlay

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СКАЧАТЬ was none too pleased with this.

      ‘Maybe we should wait until you’re able to come,’ I suggested.

      ‘Don’t go inside. Wait across the street until a worker comes out. A washerman or a serving girl. Someone who could do with a penny. See what you can find out, but do nothing that’ll put you at risk. Above all, don’t let Cream’s men see you.’

      I nodded.

      ‘I’m quite serious, Barnett. I doubt you’d get a second chance this time.’

      ‘I don’t intend to go anywhere near his men,’ I said unhappily. ‘I’d as soon not be going there at all.’

      ‘Just be careful,’ he said. ‘Come back here when you have something.’

      As I made to go he glanced up at the ceiling, where the scrape of furniture being moved could be heard.

      The Barrel of Beef was a four-storey building on the corner of Waterloo Road. In the evenings it was patronized mostly by young men arriving in hansom cabs from across the river, looking for some life after the theatres and political meetings had shut down for the night. Downstairs at the front was a pub, one of the biggest in Southwark, with two floors of supper rooms above that. The rooms were often booked out by dining societies, and on a summer’s night, when the windows were open and the music had begun, it could be like walking past a roaring sea. On the fourth floor were gaming tables, and these were the most exclusive. This was the respectable face of the Barrel of Beef. Around the back, down a stinking lane of beggars and streetwalkers, was the Skirt of Beef, a taproom so dark and so fugged with smoke you’d start to weep the minute you stepped in.

      It was a cold July so far, more like early spring, and I cursed the chill wind as I set myself up on the other side of the street, slumped in a doorway like a tramp aside the warm cart of a potato man, my cap pulled low over my face, my body covered in an old sack. I knew too well what Cream’s men would do if they discovered me watching the place again. There I waited until the young men got back into their cabs and the street went quiet. Soon a group of serving girls in drab grey clothes came out and marched down eastwards towards Marshalsea. Four waiters were next, a couple of chefs behind. And then, at last, just the kind of old fellow I was looking for. He wore a long ragged coat and boots too big for him, and he hurried and stumbled down the street as if in urgent need of a crapper. I followed him through the dark streets, barely bothering to keep hidden: he’d have no reason to suspect anyone would be interested in him. A light rain began to fall. Soon he arrived at the White Eagle, a gin palace on Friar Street, the only drinking place still open at that late hour.

      I waited outside until he had a drink in his hand. Then I strode in and stood at the counter next to him.

      ‘For you?’ asked the fat bartender.

      ‘Porter.’

      I had quite a righteous thirst and downed half the pint in a single swallow. The old fellow supped his gin and sighed. His fingers were puckered and pink.

      ‘Troubles?’ I asked.

      ‘Can’t drink that stuff no more,’ he growled, nodding at my pint. ‘Makes me piss something rotten. Wish I could, though. I used to love a drop of beer. Believe me I did.’

      Sitting on a high stool behind a glass screen was a man I recognized from the street outside the Beef He wore a black suit, rubbed thin at the elbows and ragged at the boot, and there was not a hair on his head. His match-selling business suffered on account of his habit of exploding into a series of jerks and tics that made people passing him jump back in fright. Now he was muttering to himself, staring into a half-pint of gin, one hand grasping the other’s wrist as if arresting its movements.

      ‘St Vitus’s Dance,’ whispered the old man to me. ‘A spirit got hold of his limbs and won’t let them go – least that’s what they say.’

      I sympathized with him about drinking beer and we got to talking about what it was like to get old, a subject about which he had much to say. Presently I bought him another drink, which he accepted greedily. I asked him what was his occupation.

      ‘Chief sculleryman,’ he replied. ‘You know the Barrel of Beef, I suppose?’

      ‘Course I do. That’s a fine place indeed, sir. A very fine place.’

      He straightened his beaten back and tipped his head in pride. ‘It is, it is. I knows Mr Cream as well, the owner. You know him? I knows all of them as run things down there. He give me, last Christmas this was, he give me a bottle of brandy. Just comes up to me as I was leaving and says, “Ernest, that’s for all what you’ve done for me this year”, and gives it to me. To me especially. A bottle of brandy. That’s Mr Cream, you know him?’

      ‘He owns the place, I know as much as that.’

      ‘A very fine bottle of brandy that was. Finest you can get. Tasted like gold, or silk or something like that.’ He supped his gin and winced, shaking his head. His eyes were yellow and weepy, the few teeth left in his mouth crooked and brown. ‘I been there ten years, more or less. He ain’t never had one reason to complain about my work all that time. Oh, no. Mr Cream treats me right. I can eat anything as is left at the end of the night, long as I don’t take nothing home with me. Anything they ain’t keeping. Steak, kidneys, oysters, mutton soup. Don’t hardly spend any money on my food at all. Keep my money for the pleasures of life, I do.’

      He finished his gin and began to cough. I bought him another. Behind us a tired-looking streetwalker was bickering with two men in brown aprons. One tried to take her arm; she shook him off. Ernest looked at her with an air of senile longing, then turned back to me.

      ‘Not the others,’ he continued. ‘Only me, on account of being there longest. Rib of beef. Bit of cod. Tripe, if I must. I eat like a lord, mister. It’s a good set-up. I got a room over the road here. You know the baker’s? Penarven the baker’s? I got a room above there.’

      ‘I know a fellow who works down there, as it happens,’ I said. ‘French lad name of Thierry. Brother of a ladyfriend of mine. You probably know him.’

      ‘Terry, is that him? Pastryman? He don’t work with us no more. Not since last week or so. Left or given the push. Don’t ask me which.’

      He lit a pipe and began to cough again.

      ‘Only, I’m trying to get hold of him,’ I continued when he’d finished. ‘You wouldn’t have a notion where I can find him?’

      ‘Ask his sister, shouldn’t you?’

      ‘It’s her who’s looking for him.’ I lowered my voice. ‘Truth is it might do me a bit of good if I help her out, like. Know what I mean?’

      He chuckled. I slapped him on the back; he didn’t like it, and a suspicious look came over him.

      ‘Bit of a coincidence, ain’t it? You happening to talk to me like that?’

      ‘I followed you.’

      It took him a minute to work out what I was saying.

      ‘That’s the way it is, is it?’ he croaked.

      ‘That’s the way it is. You know where I can find him?’

      He СКАЧАТЬ