The Mist in the Mirror (3 page)

I turned, and looked about me. To the east, where the sky was dark, the black lines of the warehouses were almost blotted out. To the west, at my back, the blood-red streaks of cloud and the setting sun. I felt inquisitive, keyed up with the interest and excitement that foreign surroundings always induced in me, and in a sense I felt at home too, for although this was a new, colder air than I was used to, there is something familiar about any port to a seasoned traveller – the sights, smells, activities, even the sprawl of streets and wharves that surround and owe their existence and livelihood to it. I was merely used to a closer, steamier air, and to the stink of the east.

As I stood, getting my bearings, studying the houses about me, my eye was caught by some slight movement at the corner, and I glimpsed a figure. It seemed to be that of a boy, some twelve or thirteen years old, thin, with a pale face above a dirty, collarless shirt. For a second, no more, I saw him look full at me, and then past me quickly, as if anxious or afraid to meet my eye. But then I saw that the sun, having flared up again suddenly against the windows, was the next second extinguished, snuffed out like a candle, as it set behind streaked storm clouds. When I looked back, the boy was gone, I supposed disappeared up the slit between the houses, and the narrow street was in darkness.

I turned and descended the flight of shallow, worn stone steps, and, pushing open a heavy oak door which had been left ajar, entered the Cross Keys Inn.

For a few seconds, until my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, I could see nothing. The hallway was cold and had a dank, below-ground smell, mingled with the fumes of smoke and ale, which must have permeated those walls over scores, perhaps hundreds, of years, for this was clearly an immensely old house.

I stood still, expecting to hear voices, or have someone appear. There was nothing. All was dark and silent, save for, somewhere within, the heavy ticking of a grandfather clock.

And then, without warning, there came a sudden terrible cry – a screech or scream, like the cackle of a crone, or the caterwaul of some creature in its death throes. It came once, ripping into the quiet building, and then twice more, a dreadful noise that made me start forward, and set my heart racing, as I looked wildly about me. A great fear rose from somewhere deep inside me. The noise had awakened terrors, and dim formless memories, though I neither recognised nor recalled the sound.

And then, there was silence again, and only the awful recollection of it was left hanging upon the air.

As I was now a little used to the gloom of the hallway, I saw that another door, also ajar, stood to my left. It took me, down a single step, into a small, dim bar parlour, with a long mahogany counter and a few benches and stools set about. The windows were small and let in scarcely any light. The room was quite empty and I was about to reach for the small brass bell that stood on the bar top, when, glancing upwards, I saw, swinging in a great oval brass cage, the source of those appalling cries. A parrot, with dull green, mouldy-looking feathers and a dreadful hook of a beak, sat there, perched on one leg on its rail. Its eye glittered and it stared steadily, malevolently, straight at me.

I felt my blood run cold. I had encountered plenty of weirder, more exotic and, indeed, more hideous and threatening birds – and, for that matter, beasts too – in my travels. There was nothing especially sinister about what I could see quite well was a perfectly ordinary parrot. And yet I recoiled from it, averted my eyes and stepped involuntarily back. I feared it. Something within me had arisen like a wave of horrible sickness at the sight of it. And far, far at the back of my mind was some forgotten memory, I supposed from remotest childhood, fluttering about like a moth, pattering at the door of consciousness. What was it? Where had I seen such a bird, heard such a cry, and why did it so terrify me? I did not know, could not tell. I only stood there, my hand frozen above the bell, the sweat now sliding down inside my collar, aware only of the black, shining eye and the gently swaying perch of that evil bird.

I was rescued by the entrance of a man, who appeared, ducking low beneath the doorway that led to the regions behind the bar, a hook-nosed, heavy-jowled fellow, wearing a baize apron. But he was civil enough and readily agreed to give me a room and supper for a couple of nights – longer, should I require it.

‘Though you’ll be moving on,’ he said, ‘soon enough.’

‘My plans are not yet certain. I want to get the measure of London. I have been in foreign countries for very many years.’

He only nodded, having, apparently, little interest in me or my history, and then led me back through the hall, up two flights of steep narrow stairs and down a passage, to the back of the house, volunteering no remark on the way save a terse warning to mind my head.

The room he showed me into was small and dark, in keeping with the rest of the place, but clean and decently furnished, with a bed, and oak table, and chair. Its window appeared to look down into some inner yard and ahead, over rooftops and chimney pots, scarcely visible now that the last light was filtering out of the sky in a thin livid line to the west.

I unpacked my few clothes and belongings and then I was overcome, all within a few moments, by an exhaustion so profound that my head swam, and my limbs felt heavy and began to ache, and, lying fully clothed upon the bed, I fell at once into as deep a sleep as I think I have ever known. The change of air, the new sights and sounds, relief at having completed the voyage and finally reached my home shores, and perhaps most of all, the intense emotions that had chased one another through me in the past few hours, all had combined to drain me completely of any energy. I was unconscious to myself and to the world for upwards of four hours, and only awakened by a knocking that brought me first through the black lower depths of sleep and up to where strange forms and figures, tattered fragments of dreams, floated about in a greenish twilight, and thence abruptly to the surface.

The room was in total darkness and I lay for several seconds, confused, uncertain where I was or what day or time it might be, my head as heavy as if I had been drugged.

The banging came again and then I located it and myself too, and got up to open the door.

A young woman stood in the narrow passageway outside and, in the wavering light behind her, I glimpsed a second figure, and took a step back to let them in. But when the girl stepped into the room, carrying a jug of hot water and a basin, and went with a slow, lumbering deliberation to place it on the chest, I glanced back and saw that I had been mistaken, and that the passage was empty.

‘If you’ll want supper, you must go down. We don’t serve the rooms.’

She had a plump, bovine face, expressionless save for a film of weariness or boredom overlaying it, and a slow manner of speaking. But as she reached the door, on her way out, she looked briefly at me and the faintest flicker of interest or curiosity passed across her dull eyes, prompting me to ask if there were any other visitors staying in the house that night.

She stopped. ‘We only have two rooms. Not many come.’

‘Yes. It seems very quiet.’

‘Mostly. The rowdy ones go elsewhere.’

‘You mean the seamen?’

‘We keep a respectable house.’

‘Then you live here?’

‘With father.’

As she turned into the passage, I said, scarcely knowing why, ‘And the boy?’

For I was suddenly sure mat there
had
been someone behind her as she entered, and that it had been a boy, possibly the one I had glimpsed in the street, on my arrival – though why he interested me, I could not have told.

‘There ain’t no boy here.’

‘I thought you might have a brother – or the pot boy? I saw one in the street as I came.’

‘Oh, out there.’ She sounded almost scornful. ‘There’d be anyone out there. Boys or the like. Anyone.’

When she had gone, I went to the window. The rain had stopped. But I could see nothing at all save the feeble light from some room below that scarcely penetrated the gloomy area of the yard. The place seemed to belong to another time and a past far beyond that in which I had been living. Here, I was inhabiting a city of the books and stories I had read as a boy, a place of the imagination rawer than any reality, and one which had remained scarcely changed for centuries. For the time being, until I had my bearings, that suited me well. I thought that I would make the transition from my own past and very different life, to whatever future I was to have, quite gradually. Here, in this quiet, dark little inn hard by the river, I had an odd sense of being suspended in a limbo, of belonging to no real time or place.

My room was small and close, and comfortable enough, but there was nothing in it to which I could become attached nor would the people I had so far seen make any claims upon me or, in all probability, impress themselves greatly upon my consciousness at all. I had never yet made any ties or set down roots. In the whole of my adult life I had belonged to no one person or place, since the death of my Guardian so many years before – and of the time before that, of course, I knew nothing.

Whether I would ever do so, I had no idea. But I knew that I had come to the end of travelling, and I was very conscious of my approaching middle years, and aware that, sooner or later, I would have to settle, to make some commitment to a place, and to particular people, or else I should end my life at last, as an isolated, peculiar, unhappy old man.

I washed, and made my way along the dim passages and down the stairs to the bar, where I was served a plain, decent supper in a corner, away from the few drinkers who had begun to drift in and talk together. I would have been content and unperturbed – I was still heavy and a little dazed after my sleep – were I not made to feel thoroughly
uneasy and distracted by the steady, malevolent gaze of the parrot, which sat hunched in its brass cage, staring in my direction, and never once turning its head but only half closing its eyelids from time to time, to veil the gleam for a moment, before it glared at me again.

I took a single glass of brandy, still alone at the small table, and then returned to my room. My going attracted as little interest as my presence had done.

In spite of the afternoon’s rest, I felt exhausted again, and although I had one of Conrad Vane’s travel diaries, of a journey to the Antipodes, and intended to begin re-reading it, the print soon swam before my eyes, and I turned down the lamp and went to sleep.

But, this time, I did not dive so deep into unconsciousness and, when I awoke, I knew at once both who and where I was and, moreover, sensed that only an hour or so had passed. And indeed, when I turned up the lamp, my watch showed that it was not yet midnight. I was now so wide awake, and full of a sudden restless energy, a desire for fresh air and movement, that I dressed and went back downstairs.

The bar was empty and the dreadful parrot cage covered over with a maroon shawl, but the landlord was still about, clearing pots, and he agreed curtly to leave the front door unlatched – I was to shoot the bolts and bar it on my return.

I suppose I intended to walk for perhaps half an hour. I re-traced the route by which I had come here earlier in the day and before long, by cutting down this and that alleyway between the high buildings, came to the River Thames.

The thick rain clouds had completely blown away during the evening and the temperature had dropped a little, so that the sky was clear and showed a multitude of stars. The moon was three quarters full, riding high like another ship over the water and giving enough pale light to see by. I
stood and, for a moment, closed my eyes and breathed in the river smell, its sourness and dampness, the pungent mixture of rotted wood and oil and tar, the faint fish stench, and, mingled with it, the distant smell of the open sea. A boat or two slipped secretly down the dark water, lamps bobbing astern, and then another came close to the bank, creaking as it passed me. Farther to my right, the great ships loomed up, somewhere among them the one upon which I had travelled. But I had no yearning to return with them when they sailed away again, no feeling of nostalgia for any of those countries I had left behind. A curious sense of belonging here, of having come home, had settled upon me, so that the smell of London’s river seemed a welcome, and even an old familiar, one.

I spent some time walking alongside the wide, flowing water, and then turned away and into a maze of streets and yards and passages and squares that led me towards the city. I felt a strange excitement, as keen as any I had known in my youth, when first arriving in some new land, a desire to see, to know, to discover.

Beside the river it had been quiet, save for the silky sound of the craft through the water and their gentle wash against the bank. I had scarcely seen another person. But now, although at first the streets seemed deserted, I became gradually aware of a hidden life on all sides of me, of figures huddled on steps and in doorways, of footsteps and of sudden hissing, whispering voices. Once or twice a cab passed me, once I caught sight of a constable a little way ahead.

Then I turned again and found myself beside a church, and, hard by it, another, whose spires and roofs were silver as fish scales in the moonlight, and below them, behind locked iron gates, graveyards and vaults, casting long shadows. But they were places of great beauty to me, they held no horror or dread, and I gazed at them in wonder, for
these were the very places of which I had read and dreamed, these ancient, graceful London churches.