Soot by Andrew Martin

Author:Andrew Martin [Martin, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472152442
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-07-05T23:00:00+00:00

Fletcher Rigge, in continuation.

I passed the next hour in the room with Gowers, but I might as well have been there alone.

The candle flames – Gowers had carried the mantelpiece one back to its proper place without comment – wasted uneasily in the diverse draughts as I attempted to draw Gowers out in conversation. I mentioned Milton, but Gowers cut me off: ‘It is far too large a subject.’ Gowers would not be drawn out even on the question of his own art. Asked whether he had a book in hand, he grunted, ‘Of course. A man must live, mustn’t he?’ Asked the title, he muttered something like, ‘Observations’, and I had to make do with that, as he resumed his staring into the middle distance, or down into the flames of the fire.

I attempted to get back to the personalities of the Black Diamonds, or the literary men in the houses roundabout, but Gowers simply said, in a low tone, ‘It is a wonder we are all alive.’

Presently – and while drinking a good deal more wine than my host – I began speaking of the coach ride from York, and Gowers let me ramble on, while never once looking at me.

We had left York in a white fog – I told him – which had mercifully obscured the Tyburn at the start of the Great North Road. The land had been enclosed almost all the way, but in Lincolnshire – where the wind had fairly screamed at us – the fields had been bare of sheep, the creatures presumably huddled in the brick pens that I would see occasionally. The sheep – a stupid, but liberty-loving creature – only seeks indoor refuge in the vilest weather. The snow had given out around Peterborough, while the trees had stopped at about Royston, to be replaced by thorn bushes, and then, in Highgate, by houses.

Gowers showed no interest in this topography, but still he let me run on. Therefore I explained how I had become fascinated by the driver, and I attempted to fascinate Gowers about him . . .

The fellow always made the stages on time, with only occasional consultations of his watch, which he called his ‘clock’. He called the coach the ‘drag’. On boarding at York, I had noticed scratches all down the sides, and I first saw the reason for these somewhere about Doncaster. The driver enjoyed giving any other vehicle on the road ahead the go-by. ‘Ought to just shave past,’ he’d say, and I would tense as the fellow whipped the horses on prior to some reckless manoeuvre. I had come to quite enjoy these spurts of speed after a while.

The coachman knew all the inns, which he called ‘Jerry shops’, and on each of our two nights of laying over, he let me – as the outside passenger – have the first hot bath. In those inns he drank gin, which he called, quite unfathomably, ‘ribbon’. He and I had usually shared a table: two dishes apiece, two pastries and a penny to the waiter.

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