Extract from The Second Mr Booth by Ian Madden
Chapter One: London, March 1850
The day is just waking when down he clatters from the rooftop wrapped in a
blanket, top hat on, calling out for his overcoat, muffler and a lead pencil.
‘There’s always one in the pocket of your top coat,’ I say, suddenly
certain that this will be the very morning when there isn’t.
‘That stub’s too small to use anymore. I mean a new one.’
‘What’s the rush?’
He doesn’t tell me, just throws the blanket over a chair and grabs his
coat. From that little balcony up there he’s caught sight of something more
pressing than the river and its changing light. I’m not going to nag by asking
what. It’s obviously something he can’t take his time over.
‘There’s one,’ I point to a pencil beside that pot of sweetbriar on the
windowsill.
I have a quick peer out of the window to see if I can see what’s so
interesting, so urgent. All I see are a couple of watermen and a Peeler
straining to haul a sack – or, dear God, a body – ashore.
‘You’re never going to…’
He’s not exactly pouting but his lips are shaped, ready, as if he’s going to
blow into the mouthpiece of a musical instrument. Before I can break my oath
about no nagging, he’s picked up the lead pencil, got one arm in the sleeve of
his overcoat, forgotten the urge for a muffler and has dashed out of the door.
When you live with someone there are times when you’re glad they are
there with you. And there are other times when you’re just as glad they’re out
of your sight. But when they bolt off unexpected you’re between two stools.
You’re curious rather than thankful. So I go up onto the roof and watch him
from the railed-in balcony where he studies the river, morning and evening.
Look at him shift! In the time it’s taken me to squeeze myself up through
the hole he had cut to admit him to the roof, he’s gone down the garden path,
out through the gate, over the pathway and down to the river landing-stage.
Even though he’s got a good twenty-five years on me, he can’t half move
when he wants to.
You wouldn’t think it but this time last year he was nearly a goner. He
came down with cholera. I nursed him through it. But it was a close thing.
We came to live here at the end of that terrible hot summer when it was
dangerous to be anywhere near the river. I’ve known nothing like it. Everyone
said 1846 was the hottest summer in history. I could well believe it. Boatmen
were dying of sunstroke. On the Thames! The constabulary ordered people to
keep their dogs muzzled or chained up because of the worry over rabies. Part
of the Fleet River exploded; that covered-over bit, the section that’s all
sewage. Think of it: an explosion of doings flying through the air all heated up,
practically baked.
People hereabouts take him for my husband. He doesn’t correct them. In
fact he encourages it. Shopkeepers call him ‘the admiral’. He’s always loved
the sea – that’s how we met, on his trips to Margate – so it pleases him, being
taken for an old sailor. And why not? After all, he’s made his living from – and
off – the river as much as, maybe more than, many a waterman. Yes,
someone who belongs beside and on the river. That’s who he is round here.
And that’s the way he wants to keep it.
The local children call him by a nickname they must have learned from
their parents. I’m not sure whether or not it’s cheek. But cheek or no, it’s
protection. He’d prefer ‘Mister Booth’ no doubt, but like I said to him, ‘It shows
they don’t know. Better they think you’re Puggy Booth than have your real
name known.’ He didn’t disagree.
Some women – wives – say ’My Sid’ or ‘My Harry’ like they’re talking
about a part of their bodies; kneecaps or bunions. If you ask me, any woman
who puts ‘my’ in front of her husband’s name marks herself out as soft in the
head. Try doing that with him and you’d come a cropper. We get along well
enough but there’s no sugar sprinkled over our domestic arrangements. I
certainly wouldn’t call him ‘mine’ – even behind his back. And him? Would he
call me ‘my Sophia’? I don’t have to hope he wouldn’t; I know he wouldn’t.
If I’m going to tell you about him, I’ll have to call him something. What
though? Round here they know him as ‘Mr Booth’. I have to laugh. He has
taken my name. (It’s my name on the lease. Otherwise he’d be what he calls
‘traceable’.) What do I call the man I live with? Not Billy, that’s for certain. Only
his father called him that. Truth to tell, I hardly ever use his name. When I’m in
another part of the cottage, I’ll shout ‘Tea’s ready’ as if to a crew. He doesn’t
call me by my name, either. I can’t remember the last time I heard my name on
his lips. There’s just the two of us here, why use names?
Like I said, Billy was what his father called him. No one else does or did
– or ever dared to. To my mind, Billy is a boy’s name, or the name of someone
you’ve known since he was a boy. We first met twenty-three years ago when
he was fifty-two. He was no Billy, I can tell you. William fits him well enough.
Besides, it was his dad’s name. His actual first name is Joseph, (after his
uncle the butcher) but he never used that. For most of his life he’s been a
surname and a set of initials to the big wide world. And, to me, on first meeting
(that afternoon of militiamen and seagulls), ‘the younger Mr Turner’. I think he
sees the last of his Christian names as something left him of his father’s; like a
hat-rack or a walking stick. So ‘William’ it is.
You wouldn’t think there’d be so many people around at this hour. No
fear of me losing sight of him, though; that familiar bulk in a long dark
overcoat, tall battered black hat, not to mention his red neckerchief. There he
is, going over to join the men standing over the corpse. The stocky man is old
Arnold Spreadborough, that wily waterman, William’s favourite. The body looks
like it is – was – a woman.
The Peeler is sending the lankiest of the watermen – the lad Weckles –
off for help. William is squatting as he sketches. It must be back-breaking
work. At least he hasn’t taken the little seat with him, the wooden frame with a
strip of material which folds out to sit on while you’re drawing. It’s more
respectful somehow not to be too comfortable while you record such a thing.
Now at an age when most men are content to potter, look back and pass
the day unhurried, he is still telling himself Time is his Enemy and pushing
onward. I know better than to tell him not to. I know that he is doing what he
can while he can. And what he can do now requires him to get a move on. You
should see him in his studio; he’s sometimes got half a dozen paintings on the
go at once. Francis has a job keeping up; he’s no sooner stretched and primed
one canvas than William starts on it.
When it comes to his own renown, he’s like a little boy hiding under a
bed sheet. He wants his work to be seen, to be wondered at, admired – but
the man himself doesn’t want bothersome noses pressing into his affairs. I
think this is what he meant when he said, ‘If only people had the sense to
enjoy the meal and not try going into the kitchen to ferret among the potato
peelings.’ There is a difference between what he does and who he is. With
most artists, he claims, vanity gets the better of them and they won’t shun,
indeed will welcome, gallon after gallon of attention. There’s no limit to the
curiosity they’ll put up with. William has never been prey to that. He’d ward you
off with his umbrella if you asked him where he bought his neckerchief or the
name of the manufacturer of the boot-blacking he favours.
We’ve kept this cottage secret for more than three years now. Many of
the art people think he still lives in that big house in Queen Anne Street, the
one with the leaky roof and the stink of cats – and poor Hannah. Some of them
have rumbled that he doesn’t. But they don’t know where he does live. And
down river, next to a ginger ale shop, is the last place they’d think of looking.
He likes not telling people things. So he’ll never mention me. People who don’t
know him have only very limited business with him. And that business is
looking at his work. He – the man in the secretive overcoat – is nobody’s
concern but his own and, well, mine…
The ‘Mr Booth’ business got going in Deal. We’d known each other for
about eight years when he first started using my surname. John, my second
husband, had been dead for a couple of years by then. Much as William liked
Margate, he came to see it as a ‘one-eyed village’. Eventually he talked me
into going with him to Deal. No one there knew me, or him. We didn’t live there
permanently. He rented lodgings there. We lived together, on and off, for over
ten years, in one or another town along the coast, Deal usually. And when he
went abroad I returned to Margate. When he turned seventy and was no
longer up to trips over the seas, he wanted to settle somewhere with a view of
the river. Not a river, the river. To look out at whenever he felt like it. Well, he
could hardly move to an unfamiliar house and set up home by himself, could
he? At his age. I didn’t mind moving to London, but I didn’t want to burn my
boats. So I kept the house on in Margate. You never know, do you?
We don’t have guests. It’s just me and him. We’re sociable enough in our
way. But we don’t go overboard. We never invite people round. Dr Price
comes from Margate from time to time but only when he’s needed. No one
crosses this threshold for pleasure – and that’s how we like it.
Even though William has travelled more than any man I’ve come across,
the area where he grew up hasn’t lost any of its fascination. You know where I
mean, the streets going to and from Covent Garden and the incline to the
Strand and on down to the Savoy Steps, the Old Swan landings. That was
where he first watched the dragonfly boats, madder sails and the heaving
magic water. The Thames was a short trot downhill from where he was born.
These days it’s an even shorter walk away. He can see it from his bedroom
window and of course from this balcony. There it is; moody, murky, brilliant.
For someone who can be impatient with people, he never tires of the river and
what’s going on on it.
These days he rarely goes to the sea. He makes do with the river.
Though ‘makes do’ is probably the wrong way of putting it, and not what he’d
say. Its ripples, reflections, gleams never cease to fascinate and confound
him. To me, it’s just the old river doing what it always has and always will. With
him it’s a battle never to be won, but never to be abandoned. While he’s
looking at the light on the river at daybreak there’s no such thing as ordinary.
There’s always something to try and capture. Anything very unusual will make
him nimble. Like just now when he saw what he saw and he was off to sketch
some poor soul dragged dead out of the water.
I learned to read and write when I was nineteen, nearly twenty. My first
husband, Henry Pound, taught me. I don’t go in for either very much. But I
have a good memory for what people tell me. I can remember where I was
when I was told certain things. Not everything, of course. But enough.
William’s talk of rules and ‘melting them’ took place in a cab going past the
British Museum. He recalled Professor Porson and the Cider Cellar on one of
our boat trips along the river. Sitting at my kitchen table in Margate was where
he told me how fascinated he had been watching a bristle-cutter in Bristol
when he went there as a boy.
I’m not one for book-learning, never have been. But you don’t have to
be, not with pictures. That’s the beauty of them. I like the ones he’s been doing
recently. Things are less certain in them. Shapes are dissolving in the light, in
a mess, in a puzzle.
© 2013 Ian Madden