From London Far (7 page)

Meredith had followed her and the dogs had come at his heel without urging. ‘Manage it, ma’am?’ He peered at the girl in the dusk with a gleam of humour. Then his voice sharpened. ‘Manage
that
?’

The request was certainly formidable. For
that
was a short steel girder, with a flat top some six inches broad, which ran horizontally out from the building some three feet below the level of the parapet and met a farther building at about the same distance below a parapet of similar type. There were indeed, Meredith saw, several identical girders at intervals of some yards; presumably they were designed to give additional stability to the tall old buildings between which they ran; the relevant fact about them, however was that they spanned a chasm the recesses of which dusk was now rendering unplumbable. ‘You suggest’, said Meredith, ‘that we had better get across one of these?’

The girl looked at a wrist-watch – a motion which Meredith had observed her make several times in the preceding couple of minutes. ‘I’m terribly sorry.’ The girl was sincerely apologetic. ‘I’m terribly sorry, sir. But I think we better had.’

‘I beg you not to.’ Meredith frowned at having said a futile thing. ‘If we had a rope perhaps I could help–’

‘But we haven’t. And I’ll go first.’ She advanced to the parapet and there for a fraction of a second hesitated.

Meredith laid a hand on her arm. ‘Wait.’ He swung his legs over. Three feet was a long way down. The girder, in fact, could not be reached while he was in any state of balance unless he turned on his stomach and lowered himself gently while feeling about with his feet. And the disadvantage of this was that he would then be facing the wrong way round – for to walk across the girder backwards would tax an acrobat. There was no help for it. Over on his stomach he must go and the adventure must begin with an awkward about-turn.

Having seen the necessity of these manoeuvres, Meredith proceeded to carry them out. He must not look down. As soon as he had managed the turn, he must look carefully but with no strained fixity at a point on the opposite parapet immediately above the girder and move steadily towards it… And now he was over and his feet had found their hold. He straightened up, paused, turned. The opposite parapet was before him, perhaps ten feet away. Suddenly it came to him from some intuitive depth that looking straight ahead was not his particular line. For other people – yes. But he would do better after taking a good peer down… The muscles first of his neck and then of his eyes rebelled; he mastered them and peered; he saw the walls of the two buildings running down until they almost converged in the gloom. And as Meredith thoughtfully scanned this a hovering vertigo lifted and he walked briskly across the girder with a steady tread. Nor did the opposite parapet offer any difficulty. He had surmounted it before beginning to think how to do so.

‘It’s not bad,’ he called back seriously – and wondered whether he should stand watching the girl or move out of sight. She was on the girder. An appalling conviction of powerlessness seized him. He dropped on his knees and vomited – as quietly as he could. By the time he had recovered from this irresistible natural call the girl was beside him.

‘I don’t think I could have done it if you hadn’t shown me it could be done.’ She laughed a little shakily. ‘I suppose you are a member of the Alpine Club?’

‘The Alpine Club?’ Meredith shook his head seriously. ‘The Athenaeum is the only club I belong to nowadays. Some of my colleagues have a fondness for mountaineering. But I have always known I had no head for it. Dear me! What of the dogs? They baulked at the spiral staircase. I fear that the girder–’

But the dogs – weirdly enough – had taken the girder. Somehow they had got down to it and were crossing sedately now. The girl watched them, fascinated. ‘Ineffective brutes,’ she said indulgently. ‘More like goats than bloodhounds.’ She glanced once more at her watch. ‘These roofs carry on right to the end of the street. And we’ve got to make the other end at the double.’

They made it – the bloodhounds lolloping grotesquely beside them across the grimy London leads. Only when they were as far from Mr Bubear’s repository as they could get did the girl stop and begin looking for some trapdoor or staircase that would lead them downwards. Nothing of the sort immediately appeared. She halted. ‘I think’, she said seriously, ‘that we’d better take cover. You never know how these things will go.’

Meredith paused to see the girl drop securely behind a sufficiently massive chimney stack. Then he dropped down himself. But as he did so his glance travelled back the way they had come. Only an upper corner of the scene of his recent adventures was now visible. And even as he looked it disappeared, as if irresistibly sucked outwards and down. A cloud of smoke, a mass of flying debris and dust had taken its place, and in the instant of this appearance the shattering sound of the explosion followed.
And with a quaint device
, thought Meredith at his most random,
the banquet vanishes
… The reverberations died away into subsidiary rumbling scarcely registered by the outraged ear. The air was dust and fume. And suddenly Meredith cried out. ‘The Titian!’ he exclaimed in agony. ‘The Titian and the Giotto–’

‘I don’t think we need worry.’ The girl’s face, now a battlefield of sweat and grime, was close to his. ‘The birds are flown – in quite a little fleet of pantechnicons. And you may be sure that they’ve taken all that’s really first class with them.’

‘You really think so?’ Meredith peered at her hopefully. All of a sudden he looked about him and his face expressed horrified despair. ‘But the Juvenal! The Juvenal, ma’am–’

The girl smiled. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I brought it along with me.’ And from the torn opening of her frock she produced what was to Meredith a miraculously familiar leather wallet. ‘It wasn’t difficult to guess it was important. But I’m terribly sorry I had to jettison the dispatch-case you had it in. It was just when we ran–’

‘My dear young lady–’ began Meredith. Words failed him. ‘My dear,’ he said, and kissed her rapturously on a sooty nose.

They came down to earth prosaically enough through an unfastened trapdoor and a staircase leading past sundry dingy offices. The demolition of which Mr Bubear’s organization had engineered the appearance was sufficiently commonplace; a couple of blocks away nobody was at all disturbed. That Meredith and the girl ought to have gone at once and given an account of themselves was undoubted. But an unspoken agreement – perhaps to the simple effect that for the moment they had had enough – took them in the opposite direction. Their clothes were tattered and covered with dust; their faces were begrimed. This in itself excited little remark. But the fact that they were respectfully followed by a brace of bloodhounds did occasionally attract the curious eye, and Meredith, who saw no practicable means of casting off these now faithful companions, felt that it would be pleasant to find a taxi. That a bus conductor could be persuaded to harbour the creatures was unlikely, and the vision of them on an escalator and in a crowded tube was something wilder still… ‘I wonder’, said Meredith, speaking for the first time since they had gained the street, ‘if by any chance we could find a cab?’

‘Most improbable, I should say.’ The girl replied briskly, but her voice was tired. ‘I wonder what the creatures are called? Perhaps we might call them Giotto and Titian. Unless you would prefer Landseer and Fuseli.’

Meredith looked at the girl in alarm – for, having quite forgotten his own bemused reference to those eminent academicians, he found her remark as suggestive of mental derangement as she had a little time before found his. ‘Are you sure’, he said, ‘that you feel fit to walk? We could report–’

‘Quite fit.’

‘Then perhaps I may escort you home?’

‘Escort?’ The girl looked at him quaintly and burst into pleasant laughter. ‘I’m so sorry – but somehow it sounded odd after all our caperings. And I haven’t got a home in London, I’m afraid.’

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Quite nothing. Those people brought me here in a lorry, rather uncomfortably jammed up with a bad marble after the Capri
Adonis
.’

Meredith’s brow darkened. ‘The damned scoundrels!’ And he looked about him as if a policeman had better be found at once.

‘Well, I don’t know.’ The girl was philosophical. ‘I asked for it, all right. And they weren’t beastly. Just something between rough and–’ She stopped. ‘Good heavens, Titian’s gone after a cat!’

Meredith went after Titian – an uncalled-for act of proprietorship to which he felt obscurely compelled. He returned dragging the animal by the collar. It was really an enormous brute, and more sheepish than ever. ‘In that case,’ he said – and paused in perplexity. ‘In that case, we had better get something to eat.’

‘Just that,’ said the girl. ‘And a bed.’

‘Precisely so. That is to say – well, yes.’ And Meredith stopped in the middle of the pavement and looked hopefully about him, much as if he expected Elijah’s ravens to appear with pies, pasties, and a four-poster – or perhaps single bed-chambers chastely disposed on either side of the street. ‘Exactly so. And at once.’ He had been on his way, he remembered, to the Athenaeum. He had proposed to himself a little reading in the
Journal of Classical Archaeology
. And on the morrow he had been going to visit Mr Collins, the Peacockian old parasite who cared for the Duke of Nesfield’s Library at Nesfield Court. These now seemed projects infinitely remote. And the immediate necessity was indeed a meal. ‘At once,’ Meredith repeated – and saw the girl, himself, and their attendant quadrupeds walking down Lower Regent Street and presenting themselves in those august apartments so notoriously thronged with ‘noblemen and gentlemen distinguished as liberal patrons of science, literature, or the arts’. The Athenaeum would have to be deferred. A restaurant was the thing – but again, they were decidedly grubby; and yet again, there were the dogs. ‘I wonder,’ Meredith heard himself saying – just as when he had spoken from some depth of mother-wit to Mr Bubear – ‘I wonder if you would care to come and have a simple meal in my rooms, and sleep there if it would be convenient to you? Mrs Martin’ – rather hurriedly Meredith came forward with this duenna – ‘Mrs Martin, my landlady, although a trifle morose, is at bottom a motherly soul, I don’t doubt. I am sure she would–’

‘Lead the way.’ Since he had abandoned addressing the girl as
ma’am
, she had abandoned addressing him as
sir
. ‘Decidedly lead the way.’ She was looking at him with remote amusement. ‘After a square meal I’ll be fit for anything. Mothering, even.’ Her expression changed. ‘You’ve been very kind. And terribly effective. But I make one condition: no fathering.’

‘Fathering?’ Meredith was perplexed.

‘Look what we’ve been skipping through hand in hand. It makes us exact contemporaries, it seems to me. Thirty-two is your age – just as it is mine.’

‘I see.’ Meredith laughed, really amused at this fancy. ‘But I’m afraid that the sort of activities into which I have tumbled are more likely to add to my years than to take away from them. The chute we went down, for instance. I should describe that as a definitely ageing experience.’

They had turned into a quiet square – or the remains of it – and as the last light drained from the sky the bleak and pure Augustan façades, the sudden void spaces, the blank party walls, and sprawl of shoring timber began to take on mystery from the night. ‘I have no doubt’, said Meredith, ‘that you know more of what it was all about than I do.’ (Was it not to be supposed, he told himself again, that the girl was an adventuress – or perhaps one of those hard-bitten but seductive female reporters who flourish in the tight places of Hollywood films?) He took soundings on this. ‘I don’t know if you go greatly in for that sort of thing–’

‘Definitely not.’

‘Ah.’ Meredith felt considerably relieved. ‘No more do I, as you may guess. And what strikes me about it is the special quality which comes from its being a hazard more or less unique to oneself. I suppose one was in as considerable physical danger on and off for years – but in group contexts, and that makes a world of difference.’

‘That – and the suddenness. To be pitched into a fear situation quite without warning is said to be particularly traumatic.’

‘Precisely so.’ Meredith, although aware of a faint and friendly mockery, was much pleased to find the girl possessed of a vocabulary of this sort. ‘On the other hand, one does recuperate. Granted food, clothing, and shelter, the average human being can carry on indefinitely.’

‘And a few familiar objects.’ The girl now gravely supplemented him. ‘One’s own pipe or powder-puff or fireside stool may hold enormous solace. Which is why people dived for and carried away such ridiculous objects in the blitz.’

‘That is very true.’ Meredith was so struck by the interest of this that he stopped dead in the middle of the pavement. Titian and Giotto lay down and appeared to listen attentively. ‘I remember once on an evening like this–’ Meredith glanced round in the gathering darkness. ‘But – dear me! – here we are. I had scarcely realized that we had arrived.’ He turned and moved up a short flight of steps. ‘Now, I have only to find my key – But, no – on second thoughts, I think we might ring the bell. It will bring Mrs Martin at once, and we can explain ourselves.’

‘Yes,’ said the girl, faintly amused again. ‘We can do that.’

Mrs Martin had the proportions rather than the expression commonly thought of as motherly; she looked at Meredith with civil foreboding and at the girl not at all.

‘Good evening, Mrs Martin; I am afraid you expected me to dine at my club.’ Meredith, absent-mindedly endeavouring to remove an overcoat which he was not wearing, very effectively displayed the ravages perpetrated upon his veritable garments by the unregenerate Titian or Giotto of earlier in the evening. ‘But the fact is that my friend, Miss–’ Only at this moment did it occur to him that the girl’s name was unknown to him; and as she had retired some paces to the wardenship of the dogs there was no possibility of a convenient surreptitious prompting. ‘The fact is that my friend and I have been involved together–’