Phin had almost forgotten promising to accompany Toby to the Marble Arch pub that evening, and by the time he had disentangled his mind from Links and found a clean shirt, it was already seven o’clock. It was after eight when they reached the pub, and the evening was already in full swing, with a group of people singing ballads from the pub’s collection.
‘I think it’s a bit of a tradition here, this singing,’ explained Toby, as the group embarked on a gleeful rendition of a macabre ballad entitled ‘The Maid Freed from the Gallows’.
They collected drinks, ordered two platefuls of the pub’s pasta bake, and found a table. The food arrived promptly, and they ate to the accompaniment of another, equally lugubrious ballad involving a hapless lady living in Manchester Street and a lascivious but ill-fated coachman. This was cheered loudly, after which Toby went off in search of the promised scrapbooks. Phin had another drink, and somehow found himself drawn into the conversation of an earnest trio who were discussing criminal lunacy.
‘They had no rights, those poor sods who were thrown into the madhouses,’ explained one of them to Phin, clearly considering that Phin’s presence was sufficient credential to include him in their conversation. ‘And the treatment they were given … Well, for my money, most of them might have been better hanged, because, believe you me, it’d have been a living death in those places. Years and years they’d be there. Entire lifetime for most of them.’
‘And the crime didn’t have to be serious, either,’ put in the girl sitting next to him. She was wearing fashionably torn jeans, and was typing notes on a tablet in the intervals between drinking cider. ‘Pilfer a couple of blankets or an apple from a costermonger, and you could be chucked into a madhouse for years. Bethlem, Colney Hatch, Broadmoor.’
‘Still, some of them did come out. There are documented cases of that.’
‘It was the luck of the draw,’ said the girl. ‘And whether you’d got money or knew people on high.’
‘Yes, think of Charles Lamb’s sister,’ said the second man, pushing his glasses back on his nose. ‘That’s Charles Lamb the poet,’ he added to Phin.
‘Yes. Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare. Friend of Coleridge and Wordsworth,’ said Phin, then hoped this did not sound as if he was puffing off his erudition.
But the bespectacled one said, ‘Praise the gods for a man of knowledge. Have another drink on the grounds of that.’
‘Well, I’ve already had … Oh, thank you.’ It was easier to accept the drink which looked like a double. Phin had no idea if it was whisky or brandy. He tried it and still had no idea.
‘Anyway, Charlie Lamb’s sister stabbed their mother—’
‘And should have gone to the gallows for it,’ said the girl, at once. ‘Privilege of the rich, that’s all that got her off. Disgraceful.’
‘No, they judged her insane, and she was put in Islington Asylum,’ said the man who appeared to be the group’s leader.
‘But she was let out – that’s the point I’m making.’
‘Ah, but there’s that tale about how she felt the madness starting up again, and she and poor old Charles walked across the fields to put her back inside. Arms around one another, sobbing as they went. Bloody heartbreaking. Where’s my drink?’
Phin said, ‘You’re all very knowledgeable.’
‘Wait till you read the book we’re writing.’
‘If we ever manage to finish it.’
‘If we ever manage to even start it.’
‘Have any of you ever heard of an asylum called The Thrawl?’ said Phin, suddenly. He had not realized he had been going to ask this. He thought the place in Links’s sketch was probably an asylum, but it was also likely that it had never existed outside of Links’s imagination. But the man who had bought the drinks, said, ‘Thrawl. Thrawl. There’s a Thrawl Street, isn’t there? I think it’s on one of those Jack the Ripper walking tours.’
‘Oh, Jack the Ripper got everywhere if you can believe the tours,’ said the girl. ‘Like all the beds Elizabeth I’s supposed to have slept in. She was never even near most of them. Still, Jack might have bought his tobacco or his newspaper in Thrawl Street, I suppose. If you can imagine him doing something so mundane as reading a newspaper.’
‘I don’t see why not. Murderers aren’t murdering every hour of the day. They have to do ordinary things like – like grocery shopping or paying the rent. I grant you it’s difficult to imagine Jack the Ripper asking for a pound of apples or queueing up at the fish shop for a bit of cod for his supper … And don’t say he only ate kidneys, please don’t.’
‘He’d want to read the papers,’ said the man with glasses, seriously. ‘Specially the local ones – to find out what was being said about him.’
‘Hold on, though, wasn’t The Thrawl one of those old asylums they called tunnel houses?’ said the first man, ignoring this side-road.
‘What on earth is a tunnel house?’ asked Phin, and the man said, ‘Means once in you couldn’t get out. One-way street. Those were the really grim institutions in those days. Think Broadmoor set in darkest Transylvania, or Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell.’
‘There weren’t many tunnel houses though,’ said the other man, ‘because there was that fashion for people to visit asylums – to do – what did they call it? “View the lunatics”.’
‘Sunday afternoon outing,’ put in the girl, disparagingly. ‘Ranked about equal with public hangings.’
‘At least they stopped in … well, around the middle of the nineteenth century.
‘Nobody could ever go inside the tunnel houses,’ said the trio’s leader to Phin. ‘Visitors weren’t ever let in.’
Visitors weren’t ever let in. The words jabbed into Phin’s mind. But alongside this was the fact that The Thrawl had existed and had indeed been a madhouse. But if visitors had not been allowed in, there was only one way that Links could have gone in there. But Links did not need to have been inside – he could simply have known about the place, and the sketch might still have come from his imagination.
Phin said, ‘Was the place, this asylum – The Thrawl – actually in Thrawl Street?’
‘If it was, it isn’t there now,’ said the leader. ‘I only know about it because I remember seeing it referred to in some archive or other. Tower Hamlets library, I think it was. We’re making a detailed study of all the London madhouses, so we’ve been all over the city. Hell of a task it is, as well. Needs a few drinks to oil the wheels.’
‘My round,’ said Phin, taking the hint and getting up.
He could not, afterwards, remember how it was that he ended up seated at a battered piano next to the main bar, extemporizing accompaniments to several of the songs that were still being sung. He was quite surprised to find he could still sight-read, although it was as well that most of the drinkers were singing loudly enough to cover up all the wrong notes.
Toby, enthusiastically joining in with this, read out the verse about the sinister ghost river beds, which went down well, and resulted in Phin being urged to try to match up music to it so it could be sung with suitable gusto.
He thought it was as well Arabella was not here to witness this uncharacteristic behaviour, but then he realized that Arabella would have loved it; she would have entered into the spirit of it all with great enthusiasm, and she would probably have found several more songs for everyone to sing. He remembered how she had once said she had never yet heard him play the piano, and that he had promised he would play something romantic to her. At the time, he had had in mind something on the lines of Jerome Kern’s ‘The Way You Look Tonight’, or perhaps, ‘Take My Hand, I’m a Stranger in Paradise’, to a background of a candlelit restaurant overlooking a rose-filled garden. Songs about a maid consigned to the gallows for mangling an errant lover, belted out at top range in a London pub, did not quite meet the case.
‘I didn’t know you could do that, old man,’ said Toby, as they got out of their taxi considerably later, and tiptoed a bit unsteadily into the house.
‘Do what? Don’t make such a row, you’ll wake everyone up.’
‘Vamp on the piano like that.’
‘I can’t,’ said Phin. ‘Not very well, at any rate. You must have heard all the wrong notes. And you wouldn’t have heard middle C at all, because it wouldn’t play.’
‘It was still bloody good. I couldn’t do it.’
‘Yes, but I couldn’t whip out an appendix.’
‘Nor could I at the moment.’ Toby made vague stabbing and slicing gestures at the air, almost overbalancing with the effort. ‘See what I mean?’ he said. ‘Ah well, I’ll get along to my bed. It’s a solitary one tonight, but at least it isn’t a Pig-in-the-Dyke ghost bed where you get mangled and tangled.’
He began to sing,
‘O, never be lured to the ghost river beds,
Only sleep in a bed where you’re safe.
In a ghost river bed, you could end up quite dead,
On some terrible night—’
‘For pity’s sake don’t make such a row,’ said Phin. ‘It’s nearly midnight.’
‘Is it?’ said Toby. ‘By God, so it is. Midnight, the witching hour, as I live and breathe.’ He began to sing again:
‘It was on the bridge at midnight,
Throwing snowballs at the moon.
She said, “Sir, I’ve never had it”,
But she spoke too bloody soon.’
‘Toby, you’ll wake everyone up,’ said Phin, torn between helpless laughter and a sudden desire to join in with the next verse. ‘People will come storming out and complain. And you’ll probably give dear old Miss Pringle nightmares.’
‘Heaven forfend. You’re perfectly right, of course. G’night.’ He sketched a vague farewell gesture, followed it with a reasonable attempt at a courtly bow in the direction of the garden flat, then clumped along the corridor to his door.
Phin, letting himself into his own flat, hoped he was not going to dream about Victorian madhouses where people were locked away from the world for ever, and where visitors were not allowed.
With the idea of dispelling these potentially troubling shades, he checked his emails, hoping for something cheer-ful, and smiled when he saw Arabella’s name. If anybody was guaranteed to dispel darkness and chase away ghosts, it was Arabella. He opened the email and began to read.
I do hope that you’re still tangling enthusiastically with Liszt and Scaramel, because I might have found another intriguing piece for the jigsaw.
You remember I said I’d look for traces of Scaramel here? I thought it was a very long shot indeed – and I think you did, as well, although you were too polite to actually say so, of course.
But I hit on the idea of searching through back numbers of old French magazines – the gossipy kind – early versions of Hello! and those other ones that have reports of all the celebrities and the riotous parties and scandals. Scaramel was a bit of a celebrity in her day, and we know she was in Paris because of that framed playbill at Linklighters. So I thought she could have got into a few gossip columns while she was here.
I mentioned at the agency that I had promised to follow up a few bits of research for you, and they were interested. I didn’t give anything away about your project, of course, just general information. Somebody suggested Le Charivari, and then somebody else offered to make an introduction to the present incarnation of La Vie Parisienne. The original magazine apparently closed in 1970, but a paper of the same name started up in 1984, and the thought was that their offices might have old copies of the original set-up.
I dashed along to the offices the next day and it turned out that they did have old copies from the original set-up! Not all of them, of course – there were expressive mutterings about Les Boches and the devastation inflicted during WWII – but there was still quite a lot of archived stuff.
At first I couldn’t think where to start, but I remembered you emailing about that memorial concert for Liszt – you thought Scaramel had organized it – so I thought that might provide a starting point, because it meant she must have been in Paris in 1896. So I started with that year, and I found an article about her! It’s only a kind of gossip column item about a birthday party, but it gives a slightly different slant on things, and there are one or two names that might be useful. The staff let me photocopy the article, and I said if it formed any part of your final work, you would arrange to give them a suitable credit. (Was that all right?)
I’m sending the photocopy as an attachment, with my translation. I’m also sending a request to all the appropriate gods that they ensure both copies reach you intact … Is there a god of the internet, or would somebody like St Christopher, who looks benignly on travellers, be best, or maybe Mercury with winged heels? Anyway, I hope they’ll reach you uncorrupted and inviolate.
I’m missing you a huge amount, Phin, dear.
Arabella
Phin smiled at the last sentence, and opened the attachment marked ‘Translation’. Across the top, Arabella had typed, ‘From La Vie Parisenne, dated August 1896.’
It was a report of a party held a week after the formal ‘Liszten to the Symphonies’ memorial concert, and it was apparently to celebrate the birthday of someone whom La Vie Parisienne called ‘le très distingué’ Welsh poet, Rhun Rhydderch. Beneath this, Arabella had put, ‘Could this be the mysterious Welshman who wrote the murder song?’
LIVELY EVENING AT MAISON DANS LE PARC
A lavish birthday party was given at Maison dans le Parc by the English nightclub entertainer, Scaramel, to mark the birthday of her close friend, the distinguished Welsh poet, Mr Rhun Rhydderch – known among the English community as ‘Rhun the Rhymer’.
The couple have been staying in Paris for the last three months, and are often to be seen in Paris’s cafés and nightclubs. Readers will no doubt recall the dazzling performance that Scaramel gave at the Moulin Rouge last month, which brought several encores. [See photograph on page 4].
Here, Arabella had added a note in italics: Phin – sorry couldn’t find photograph – page 4 doesn’t seem to have survived.
Scaramel looked stunning for the occasion, wearing a gown of emerald silk, which our fashion editor tells us is from the house of M’sieur Worth.
The tables were presided over by no less a personage than Monsieur Alphonse himself, and a number of English performers had travelled to Paris for the birthday celebration.
Several of them provided entertainment on the restaurant’s small dais after supper.
Two charming sisters, Fancy and Frankie Finnegan, tap-danced, and Miss Dora Dashington (Dances to Delight You), treated the company to a spirited rendition of ‘A Little of What You Fancy’, with a gentleman wearing a hat playing the piano, accompanied by a personage with an English banjo.
Mr Thaddeus Thumbprint [sic] appeared dressed in the manner of Mr Charles Dickens, and read extracts from The Pickwick Papers, which were brought to life by three English actors, enacting the scenes.
It is unfortunate that a small altercation marred the later part of the evening. We understand that an English singer, Miss Belinda Baskerville (‘the Gentlemen’s Choice’), was preparing to give her own performance, but was prevented from it by Scaramel, on the threefold grounds that her style and the song she proposed to sing would not suit the occasion, that she had not been invited, and that she was seldom able to hit more than one accurate note in ten.
Scaramel stalked majestically to the door of the restaurant, and held it open, tapping one foot impatiently as Miss Baskerville collected her cloak, fan and gloves. M’sier Alphonse himself escorted her across the restaurant – ignoring, with his customary tact and politeness, the stares of the diners – and snapped his fingers to an underling to find transport for the lady.
Our photographer was again on the spot, and captured an image of her flouncing into a hansom cab outside Maison. [See page 9].
Again, Arabella had added a note of apology: Phin, again no trace of any photo of the flouncing Baskerville!
Readers will know that Scaramel’s hospitality has become famous in Paris, even in the short time she has been here, and may recall how this magazine reported on a dinner hosted last month at Maison, when she entertained the English author, Mr H. G. Wells, and several other notable names, including M’sieur Anatole France, who fell off his chair and had to be helped out to a cab – an incident our photographer was sadly unable to capture.
‘She certainly had style, that Scaramel,’ Arabella had written at the foot of the article. ‘Might you be able to follow up one or two of these names? I don’t mean H. G. Wells, obviously. But there’s certainly Rhun the Rhymer Rhydderch, and wasn’t Belinda Baskerville on the wall at Linklighters? She sounds a bit of a handful, and clearly she and Scaramel had an ongoing feud.’
Phin remembered seeing a playbill featuring Belinda Baskerville’s name at the restaurant, although she had not, until now, occurred to him as a possible line of enquiry. It was interesting to see the Thumbprints name mentioned, as well. But other than Rhun Rhydderch, who probably could not be traced after so long, he could not see that any of this was going to get him much further.
As he was climbing into bed, he found himself wondering why Scaramel had gone to Paris in the first place. Had it simply been to arrange that Liszt memorial concert? Or had there been something else – something in London she had wanted to escape from? Such as the consequences of having committed murder?
But Phin did not want Scaramel to have been a murderess. He wanted her to remain in his mind as the insouciant, defiantly disreputable lady who had frequently shocked London, and who had delighted Parisian society. The lady who had danced for the Prince of Wales and other luminaries of the day, and had cavorted across the stage of the Moulin Rouge and enjoyed public and dramatic quarrels with rivals. He had a vague idea that all this was probably the fantasizing of a hopeless romantic, or that he might be seeing things through rose-coloured – or maybe whiskey-tinted – glasses.
Even so, he did not want to find that Scaramel had scuttled out of England like a hunted creature fleeing the gallows.