Overlooking the Thames

Crossing Trafalgar Square and back on to the Strand, I felt much more comfortable. This was my London. I knew these streets, so much busier and more raucous than the quiet and genteel part of town I’d just come from. In the future, I wouldn’t avoid St James’s like I had done, though. From today, its associations wouldn’t all be with my mother. Now they’d be with Lucien Winters too, and the nutty sweetness of marchpane.

‘What are you doing here all done up on your day off, then?’

I hadn’t spotted Barky standing behind the empty foyer bar as I walked in round the back of the theatre. He dusted his hands off on his trousers as though he’d been moving boxes, but I thought it more likely I’d caught him about to take a sniff of brandy.

‘Nice to see you too,’ I said and he gave his customary snort.

‘Not come to distract Ellen from her work?’

I shook my head. I wouldn’t mind her seeing me in my nice outfit but it was Barky I really wanted to speak to. There was no one there to overhear but I leant over the bar and dropped my voice, just in case.

‘I wondered what you knew about the surprise Crillick’s been talking about. You took a message for him the other day when he came to see Ellen and me rehearse. It’s not a new act, is it?’

‘Worried for your billing, are you?’ Barky said shrewdly. ‘I was just about to have a smoke. You can walk down to the river with me.’

We went outside and I followed Barky down the alley towards the Embankment, until it widened out to a ledge where we could stand side by side overlooking the grey waters. The stink of the Thames was high, even as the weather cooled. Sometimes I heard people complain about the smell: horse dung and cat piss, rotting vegetables and dirt. That was when I knew they weren’t real Londoners. To me it smelt like home.

There were some stairs that led down to the river’s edge but no one ever used them and they were green and slick with algae. As usual, the river was busy ferrying people up and down, its fleet of steamboats cheaper and more convenient than a horse and carriage. I watched one boat go by and wondered where it was headed, who the passengers were that it carried and what they had planned for the day. Vincent and I would’ve been in Richmond by now, but I didn’t feel as upset about it as I had done earlier.

‘So, it’s definitely an act?’

‘I’d have thought so, but all the message said was that Crillick’s goods had arrived,’ Barky said.

‘It might be a mime artist? There’s been nothing like that since Guillame left,’ I said.