The Map of Time. Felix J. Palma
a certain sense this was true. Although his face retained the harmonious good looks he had been born with, it now resembled an empty shell, a vague impression in a mound of ashes. The sorrow that had cast a shadow over his soul had taken its toll on his appearance: he could scarcely recognise himself in the ageing youth, with hollowed cheeks, downcast eyes and unkempt beard, who stared back at him in the glass. Grief had stunted him, transforming him into a dried-up, sullen creature.
The brougham rocked as Harold, having overcome his astonishment, clambered up to his perch, and took Andrew’s attention away from the blurred face sketched on the canvas of the night. The final act of the disastrous performance that had been his life was about to begin, and he was determined to savour every moment. He heard the whip crack above his head and, caressing the steely bulge in his pocket, he let himself be lulled by the vehicle’s gentle sway.
The brougham left the mansion and went down Carriage Drive, which bordered the lush vegetation of Hyde Park. Gazing through the window at the city, Andrew thought that in less than half an hour’s time they would be in the East End. This ride had always fascinated and puzzled him in equal measure: it allowed him to glimpse in a single sweep every aspect of his beloved London, the world’s greatest metropolis, the giant head of an insatiable octopus whose tentacles stretched over almost a fifth of the Earth’s surface, holding Canada, India, Australia and a large part of Africa in its vice-like grip.
As they sped east, the salubrious, almost countrified atmosphere of Kensington soon gave way to the crowded urban environment of Piccadilly, and beyond to the Circus, where Anteros, the avenger of unrequited love, is firing an arrow into the city’s heart. Beyond Fleet Street, the middle-class dwellings seemingly huddled around St Paul’s Cathedral gradually came into view, until finally, once they had passed the Bank of England and Cornhill Street, a wave of poverty swept over everything, a poverty that people from the adjoining West End knew of only from the satirical cartoons in Punch. It seemed to pollute the very air itself, as it mingled with the stench rising from the Thames.
Andrew had last made this journey eight years earlier, and had known ever since that, sooner or later, he would make it again, for the very last time. Hardly surprising, then, that as they drew nearer to Aldgate, the gateway to Whitechapel, he felt slightly uneasy. He peered warily out of the window as they entered the district, experiencing the same misgivings as he had in the past. He was overwhelmed, again, by shame because he was spying on an alien world with the dispassionate interest of someone who studies insects – even though, over time, his initial revulsion had turned into compassion for the souls who inhabited this place, where the city dumped its human waste.
Now it seemed that there was every reason for him to feel compassion still: London’s poorest borough had changed relatively little in the past eight years. Wealth brings poverty in its wake, thought Andrew, as they crossed the ill-lit, rowdy streets, crammed with stalls and handcarts, and teeming with wretched creatures whose lives were played out beneath the menacing shadow of Christ Church. At first he had been shocked to discover that behind the dazzle of the city’s façade there existed this outpost of hell where, with the Queen’s blessing, human beings were condemned to live like beasts. The intervening years had made him less naïve: he was no longer surprised that, even as the advances of science were transforming London – and the well-to-do amused themselves by recording their dogs’ barks onto the wax-coated cylinders of phonographs or conversed via telephone under the glow of Robertson’s electric lamps – Whitechapel had remained immune to progress, untouchable beneath its rotten shell, drowning in its own filth.
A glance was enough to tell him that crossing into this world was still like sticking his hand into a hornets’ nest. It was here that poverty showed its ugliest face, here that the same jarring, sinister tune was playing. He observed a couple of pub brawls, heard screams from the depths of dark alleyways, glimpsed a few drunks sprawled in the gutter, gangs of street urchins stripping them of their shoes, and exchanged glances with a pair of pugnacious-looking men standing on street corners, petty rulers in this parallel kingdom of vice and crime.
The luxurious brougham caught the attention of several prostitutes, who shouted lewd proposals to him, hitching up their skirts and showing their cleavage. Andrew felt a pang of sorrow as he gazed upon this pitiful spectacle. Most of the women were filthy and downtrodden, their bodies bearing the mark of their daily burden of customers. Even the youngest and prettiest were stained by the misery of their surroundings. He was revisited by the agonising thought that he might have saved one of these doomed women, offered her a better life than the one her Creator had allotted her, yet he had failed to do so.
His sorrow reached a crescendo as the carriage rattled past the Ten Bells, emitting an arpeggio of creaks as it turned into Crispin Street on its way to Dorset Street, passing in front of the Britannia pub where he had first spoken to Marie. This street was his final destination. Harold pulled the brougham up next to the stone arch leading to the Miller’s Court flats, and climbed off the box to open the carriage door.
Andrew stepped out, feeling suddenly dizzy. His legs were shaking as he looked around him. Everything was exactly as he remembered it, down to the shop with grimy windows run by McCarthy, the owner of the flats, which stood beside the entrance. Nothing he saw indicated to him that time also passed in Whitechapel, that it did not avoid it, as did the bigwigs and bishops visiting the city.
‘You can go home now, Harold,’ he told the coachman, who was standing at his side.
‘What time shall I fetch you, sir?’ asked the old man.
Andrew didn’t know what to say. He stifled a laugh. The only thing fetching him would be the cart from the Golden Lane morgue, the same one that had come there to fetch what was left of his beloved Marie eight years ago. ‘Forget you ever brought me here,’ was his reply.
The sombre expression that clouded the coachman’s face moved Andrew. Had Harold understood what he had come there to do? He could not be sure, because he had never given a moment’s thought to the coachman’s intelligence, or indeed to that of any servant. He always thought that at most they possessed the innate cunning of people who, from an early age, are obliged to swim against the current in which he and his class manoeuvred with ease. Now, though, he thought he detected in old Harold’s attitude an unease that might only have come from his having guessed Andrew’s intention.
And the servant’s capacity for deduction was not the only discovery Andrew made during that brief moment when, for once, they looked directly at each other. Andrew also became aware of something hitherto unimaginable to him: the affection a servant can feel for his master. Although he saw them as shadows drifting in and out of rooms, according to some invisible design, only aware of them when he needed to leave his glass on a tray or wanted the fire lighting, these phantoms could care about what happened to their masters. That succession of faceless people – the maids whom his mother dismissed on the flimsiest grounds, the cooks systematically impregnated by the stable boys as though conforming to some ancient ritual, the butlers who left their employ with excellent references for another mansion identical to theirs – made up a shifting landscape that Andrew had never taken the trouble to notice.
‘Very well, sir,’ murmured Harold.
Andrew understood that these words were the coachman’s last farewell; that this was the old fellow’s only way of saying goodbye to him – embracing him was a risk he appeared unwilling to take. With a heavy heart, he watched that stout, resolute man, to whom he would have had to relinquish the role of master if they had ever been stranded on a desert island, clamber back on to the brougham and urge on the horses, leaving only an echo of hoofs as the carriage was swallowed by the fog that spread through the London streets like muddy foam. It struck him as odd that the only person to whom he had said goodbye before killing himself should be the coachman, not his parents or his cousin Charles. Life was full of such ironies.
That was exactly what Harold Barker was thinking as he drove the horses down Dorset Street, looking for the way out of that accursed neighbourhood, where life was not worth thruppence. But for his father’s determination to pluck him from poverty and secure him a job as a coachman, he might have been one more among the hordes of wretched souls scraping an existence in this gangrenous patch of London. Yes, that surly