The New Life: A Novel by Crewe Tom

Author:Crewe, Tom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

XVIII

TRAVELING TO HOLBORN VIADUCT was like journeying to the center of the earth. The train from Brixton seemed to move under rather than over ground: the fog pressed round it with the solidity of packed dirt. And arriving at the other end, stepping onto the street—“stepping” in fact being too active a verb, for what amounted to a kind of hesitant merging—was to be confronted with a landscape gaseous, vaporous, oddly lit, obliquely cavernous. The fog was chill, it touched your face and squeezed itself out on your tongue like a smelly, greasy piece of dishcloth. The patch of pavement underfoot was your only surety. Henry merged out of the station on his, looking with everyone else—the people he was definitely aware of, lit from behind by the station lights—along where the street should be, trying to impose remembered coordinates on the dimensionless yellow mass. A cab gradually came into view, the horse’s hooves sounding individually, ominously, like a policeman’s knock. Clop. Clop. Clop. Clop. A man with a lantern was walking in front—like Charon, gently steering his boat down the Styx.

At the spot where the man and the cab disappeared back into the fog, Henry was able to isolate dark shapes and small areas of brighter yellow. Eventually he was able to connect them and see that they were people. Another moment, and they were boys, bearing lamps. One presented himself. He was aged about fourteen, his face gnawed into an uneven maturity; his jawline and chin were fuzzed with soft hair that showed angelically in his light. “Where’re you after, sir?”

Henry said, and a few others nearby stated their own destinations. He was pleased and surprised to hear a woman repeat Hanway Hall after him—she and her friend could only be going to Edith’s lecture. The boy considered and said in a dignified fashion who he could take without general inconvenience. They set off behind him, five of them, shuffling like a chain gang. All of them coughed, the boy most frequently. As they moved, their surroundings altered and veered, became close and then distant: people, post-boxes, carriages, buildings, walls, windows with lights in them. Henry wondered about the two women who were going to Edith’s lecture. It occurred to him to make conversation but he didn’t, even though he always found that fog gave him confidence, by putting other people at a disadvantage. After a while they were the only three still in transit. One man had been deposited at a corner, and another directed to the opposite side of the street, the boy throwing his light as far as he could onto the road, and spitting into it at the same time.

As they with difficulty navigated an unsuspected crater in the pavement, the woman who’d spoken earlier said to her friend, “I hope she’s worth it.”

“If she isn’t,” the friend replied, “let’s make up for it by having something nice to eat after.”

When they got there, with a scattering of coins and commendations for their guide, the fog was snuffing about in the entrance, seeking out corners and the bottoms of skirts.

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