The Victoria Vanishes

∨ The Victoria Vanishes ∧

50

Ashes To Ashes

Raymond Land set down the food bowl and sneezed violently. “What I want to know,” he demanded, “is how come I end up having to look after Crippen when I’m the one who’s allergic to cats. Are you listening to me, Leanne?”

“No, darling,” said his wife, who was licking a lipstick pencil and straightening her décolletage in the bathroom, readying herself for a night of sin and self-deception with a Spanish toyboy she had picked up in the Madeira Tapas Bar, Streatham.

Land searched forlornly for the litter tray. “You always seem to be refurbishing yourself these days. Where are you going?”

“I’m off to rumple some hotel sheets and have cheap champagne dribbled over my naked body,” she answered through mashing lips.

“I thought you were visiting your mother. It’s raining so hard, the cat can’t go out. What have you done with its litter?”

“I wouldn’t touch the stuff, and if you knew what my nails cost you wouldn’t let me either. Don’t you remember? Sergeant Longbright gave you the tray and the bag when she brought the cat over.”

Land located the litter bag, unfolded it and removed a clear plastic envelope filled with grey powder. Tearing the top with his teeth, he tipped it into the yellow plastic tray as a cloud of dust blossomed and penetrated his nasal membranes. “This stuff is awful,” he complained. “It smells like Oswald’s mortuary.”

“The only thing Oswald’s mortuary smelled of was Oswald,” said Leanne, pouting her lips in the mirror and wondering about their effect on Hispanic gentlemen under the age of twenty-five.

♦

How could you begin to explain London?

A city once the colour of tobacco and carrots, now chalky stone and angled steel, but vivid chimney pots can still be glimpsed between slivers of rain-specked glass. Nine billion pounds’ worth of Christmas bonuses have just been spent in the city’s square mile. In the great financial institutions, whirlpools of money are stirred until the ripples splash all but those on the farthest reaches of society. To accommodate this expenditure, the insurance offices and banks of Holborn have reopened as opulent restaurants and bars. At night, drunken merriment splits the capital’s seams, and daybreak arrives more silently than midnight.

You can’t explain London, of course. That is the root of its charm. A pair of elderly men, overlooked by the young, whittling their thoughts into bar banter, ensconced in run-down public houses in unalluring parts of the world’s richest city, what could they know or hope to change?

For if they hoped that their actions might ultimately change the policies of the government, challenge public opinion, inspire the complacent, even alter the course of the city’s history, they were wrong. London, the law unto itself, could continue quite happily without their interference. And yet, without them, it could only be a poorer place.

John May went into the University College Hospital on March 12^th for his cancer operation. Arthur Bryant went with him, and stayed by his side until the orderly came to take his old friend down for surgery. As John May passed through the doors, he raised his head from the pillow and gave a look back at his great friend that said I know what you’re about, and don’t you ever forget it. Everything is understood between us.

The framed photograph placed behind the bar of the Pineapple pub in Leverton Street, Kentish Town, shows a wrinkled tortoise sporting windowpane glasses and a frayed brown trilby, wrapped in a moss-green scarf like an unravelling knitted python. Close beside him, taller and just three years younger, is a ramrod-backed gentleman of debonair demeanour, dressed in a rather gaudy Savile Row suit and a scarlet silk tie.

They are smiling for the camera and for each other, as if they have finally come to understand all the secrets of the city.