It wasn’t quite London smog, but it would do. James Batchelor breathed it in, standing on the dockside at Liverpool. Behind him, Matthew Grand was supervising the unloading of the luggage and looking for a cab.
‘My God!’ Batchelor was suddenly nudging Grand in the ribs. ‘Look there. Getting into that cab. It can’t be. But it is! My God, it is!’
‘Whatever’s the matter with you, James? You can’t be that glad to be home. It’s only Liverpool, after all.’
‘That’s Charles Dickens!’ Batchelor mouthed the words, as though he was afraid that if he spoke loudly, the bubble would burst and it would all be revealed as a dream. ‘The most brilliant novelist of the age. Of any age.’
‘That’s not how he sees himself,’ Grand commented.
‘What? How do you know how he sees himself?’
‘Well, he happened to mention it one night on the deck. The American tour’s taken it out of him. He’s not a young man, you know.’
‘American tour? What American tour? Deck? How do you mean, deck?’
‘James,’ Grand frowned, looking the man in the eyes. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Do you seriously mean to tell me that you’ve spent eleven days on board the same ship as Charles Dickens and you didn’t notice him?’
‘Notice him? Of course I didn’t notice him. Why didn’t you tell me?’
Grand sighed. ‘Mostly because you spent nine of those eleven days adding appreciable volume to the Atlantic Ocean. I hardly liked to intrude. What was it you said? “Leave me alone. I want to die.”’
‘I didn’t mean it,’ Batchelor shouted. ‘If I’d known …’
‘Well, if it makes you feel any better, Mr Dickens wasn’t too well either. Kept to his cabin, mostly. I obviously caught him on a good day.’
‘Oh, for God’s … Mr Dickens! Mr Dickens!’ and Batchelor ran the length of the quay as Dickens’s cab was about to pull away. He was stopped when he ran headlong into a very large man in an Ulster. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ the man said. ‘Mr Dickens doesn’t give autographs.’
‘Autographs? No, no,’ Batchelor gushed. ‘You don’t understand. I’m a huge, huge fan. And a novelist. Well, I’d like to be a novelist … I—’
‘Not today, sir, if you please.’
‘My card,’ Batchelor fumbled for it. ‘At least, give him my card, could you?’
The man in the Ulster glanced down at it before opening the cab door and getting in. ‘I’ll see if I can find the time,’ he said, and the cab lurched away.
Grand and Batchelor were almost home and Batchelor was still not speaking, except in monosyllables when strictly necessary. He was perfectly content; he knew the mood would pass as soon as the next enthusiasm came along, and he was actually quite excited to be nearly home. He had left a lot of memories behind in America, but that was then. He had loved his time there, but he wouldn’t miss the dog-eat-dog of Washington’s politics. In their absence, there had been an election, and that nice Mr Gladstone was at Number Ten.
‘What could be better?’ Grand had asked Batchelor, ‘than to have a prime minister who speaks fluent Ancient Greek, chops down trees for a hobby and picks up fallen women of an evening? Back to normality, huh?’
And as for Grand, he wasn’t sorry to have left Washington either; Alsatia and his enquiry business – that was his future. He looked around him as the cab dropped them off on the corner.
‘It’s odd, James, isn’t it,’ he said, with no expectation of a reply, ‘how the memory plays tricks? I hadn’t remembered the old place as being so busy.’
And it was busy. The street was crammed with people, most of them pushing carts or carrying baskets, and the smell was appalling. It was as though Smithfield had come to Alsatia and gone rotten into the bargain.
Batchelor looked up. ‘It wasn’t so busy,’ he said. ‘And why are all these people cats’-meat men?’ He looked again. ‘And women? And children?’
A memory surfaced in the brain of both. They were, after all, not enquiry agents for nothing. It was a memory of Mrs Manciple, cooing over kittens. Saying, as the eighth made an appearance, how they would soon have enough …
Leaving the cabbie standing over their luggage, they both broke into a run. They had to employ some tried and tested tactics to get to their front door, and were rather smeared with offal and worse by the time Batchelor managed to turn his key in the lock.
The smell inside was, if anything, worse than that in the street. On every surface, there were cats. They flowed in a velvet stream up the stairs, and kittens clung with pin-sharp claws halfway up the curtains, batting invisible flies from the air with an outstretched paw, their mouths open in silent mews. A tom, big with lust, was stalking a flirty female on Grand’s desk while a previous recipient of his attentions quietly gave birth in the cold hearth.
‘Mrs Manciple?’ Grand called. ‘Mrs Manciple, we’re home!’
From the kitchen came an incoherent cry of delight and the housekeeper appeared, her arms full of a huge tabby, which looked at the two men with baleful green eyes.
‘Oh, sirs!’ she said, dropping the cat unceremoniously to tumble angrily amongst the throng. ‘You’re back. And look – almost enough cats! You won’t need to go out looking for them any more! You can get on with your writing, Mr Batchelor. And you can …’ She was stuck. She had never been quite sure what nice Mr Grand did for a living, when not out looking for felines.
Grand looked at Batchelor, who nodded.
‘I’ll go and fetch the ambulance,’ he said. ‘It’s not the nearest, but I think the Bethlem …?’
‘Tell them we’ll pay, James. But most of all, tell them to be quick. And leave the door open on your way out, hmm?’ Batchelor nodded and ran. ‘Now, Mrs Manciple,’ Grand crooned, in the voice he reserved for kittens, small babies, drunks and, now, mad housekeepers, ‘let’s go and sit down, shall we, and I’ll tell you all about our trip. Mr Batchelor nearly met Charles Dickens, you know …’