1

Nothing inclined Charles Ambrose to Darwinism more than walking the narrow streets of Bethnal Green. He saw there not equals separated from him only by luck and circumstance, but creatures born ill-equipped to survive the evolutionary race. He looked on their pale thin faces – which often had a sour mistrustful cast, as if expecting at any moment to encounter a boot – and felt they inhabited their proper place. The notion that if only they’d had access to grammar and citrus fruit at an early age they might have one day sat beside him at the Garrick was preposterous: their predicament was nothing more than evidence of failure to adapt and survive. Why were so many of them so short? Why did they screech and bellow from windows and balconies? And why, at noon, were so many so drunk? Turning down an alley, twitching his fine linen coat closer, he felt much as he might if viewing them through iron bars. This is not to say that he felt no compassion: even animals in zoos should have their cages cleaned.

Four had gathered in Edward Burton’s rooms that August afternoon: Spencer, Martha, Charles and Luke. Their intention was to walk further into Bethnal Green, whose slums and rookeries were candidates for demolition and replacement with the good clean housing Parliament had promised. ‘It’s all very well passing Acts,’ Spencer had said, not knowing how precisely he mimicked Martha, ‘but how much higher will the infant death toll rise before policies are put in place? It’s actions we need, not Acts!’

Edward’s mother served lemon biscuits on a plate from which the Queen’s head looked grimly out, and fretted that her son was tired. He’d been silent in such company and responded only to Martha’s quiet asides – was the old wound hurting? Could he show Spencer the plans he’d been making for a new estate? ‘Very feasible,’ Spencer had said, though really he knew nothing about it. He smoothed his hands across the length of white paper on which Edward had drafted, with all his painstaking untutored skill, the blueprint of a tenement block set around a square of garden. ‘Can I take this – can I show my colleagues? Would you mind?’

Luke meanwhile had eaten his fifth biscuit, having admired Mrs Burton’s evident attention to cleanliness, and said, ‘Martha won’t be happy until she’s seen Thomas More’s Utopia encamped on Tower Hill.’ He’d licked sugar from his thumb, and looked merrily out at the ranks of peaked roofs past the window. Writing to Cora had been like lancing a boil: in due course there might be further discomfort, but for now he felt only relief. What he’d written had been the truth, at least while he still held the pen: he expected nothing back, had offered no bargain, thought himself owed nothing. Probably the euphoria would last no more than another day, but it was a heady thing while it lasted, and made him benevolent. Sometimes, imagining a sealed envelope making its way to his door on the back of a postman’s bike, he grew anxious: would she be amused – would she be moved – might she ignore it and go on blithely as before? Knowing her, he thought the last most likely: it was difficult to penetrate her good temper, or move her beyond a general display of affection to everyone she knew.

‘Off we go then, slumming it,’ said Charles rather gleefully, putting on his coat, remembering how years before he and a companion had one night been tourists of poverty, dressing in drag and loitering under streetlights, drumming up not a solitary client between them.

‘You might be sold a bad oyster,’ said Edward Burton, not yet well enough to take up his post over at Holborn Bars, ‘but keep your wits about you and you’ll all come home again.’

As they’d left it was not yet closing time in the factories and offices, and so the alleys were rather quiet, and it was possible to make out the sound of trains shunting on the tracks a few hundred yards distant. All around, high tenements blotted out the light, and laundry hanging low above them could never have been got clean. Though the summer was mild the few scraps of sunlight coming through seemed hotter there, so that before long Martha felt her clothes grow damp between her shoulder-blades, and the pavements, slicked with fallen scraps of food, gave off the sweetish scent of decay. What had once been grand houses were divided meanly into many small apartments, let at prices out of all proportion to what wages it was possible to earn. Rooms were sublet, and sub-let again, so that what constituted a family had long been forgotten, and strangers bickered over cups and plates and their few square feet of space. Less than a mile away, just beyond the City griffins, the landlords and their lawyers, their tailors and their bankers and their chefs, knew only what was totted in the columns of their ledgers.

Here and there Martha saw reasons to hope that passed the others by, and sometimes nodded, and smiled, because all those strangers’ faces were familiar. A woman in a scarlet jacket appeared from behind a lace curtain to water the geraniums on her windowsill, and tossed away a couple of spent blooms that landed in the gutter beside a broken Guinness bottle. Polish labourers had come to seek work, discovering that if Dick Whittington had been misled about London’s pavements, the weather was at least more temperate in the winter and the docks never slept. They were cheerful and noisy; they leaned in doorways in pairs with their caps tipped, passing a Polish newspaper back and forth; they smoked black-papered cigarettes that gave off a fragrant pall. A Jewish family went volubly by on their way to catch a bus, and the girls wore red shoes; a moment later an Indian woman passed on the other side and in each ear was a bit of gold.

But even Martha had to concede it was frequently a miserable scene: a young mother sat on a doorstep enviously watching two children eat cheap white bread and margarine, and a group of men watched a bulldog in training for a fight hang by its jaws from a high rope. Someone had thrown aside a copy of Vanity Fair, and from the cover an actress in a yellow dress smiled placidly out; beside it in the gutter a clever-eyed rat flexed its little hands. Passing the men with their dog Martha couldn’t suppress her distaste: she glowered at them openly; a man with sleeves rolled high to show a blurred tattoo lunged at her, and laughed as she scuttled on. Luke, more familiar with the seamy city than he’d let on, a little amused by Spencer’s display of social conscience, allowed himself to grow chivalrous and walked more closely at her side.

‘Will it work? – it must work,’ she said, gesturing ahead to where Charles walked with Spencer, picking his distasteful way through a litter of rotten fruit from which a cloud of small flies puffed. ‘He must see this is unsustainable, if only out of common humanity!’

‘How can it not? Bit of a stupid man I’ve always thought, but not an unkind one – evening, love,’ he said, grinning at a woman in a curled wig who leaned invitingly out of her door and blew him a kiss as he passed.

‘It’s no use – Spencer has tried – I’m long past redemption.’ There ahead of them on the path his friend was gesticulating towards an especially narrow alley from which a sour smell came. ‘He’s doing all this mostly for your sake, you know. He’d give a fortune to a beggar if you asked him but otherwise would never notice they’re there –’

She considered denying this, but felt that what with one thing and another the Imp had earned her honesty. ‘It’s not so bad of me, is it? I’ve never promised him anything – and besides, I’m not what his family would’ve had in mind! – but I can’t do this alone. I’m a woman and a poor one – they might as well’ve cut out my tongue.’

They’d come to a kind of courtyard overlooked on all sides by tenement blocks. Luke watched his friend stand with arms folded surveying the insoluble problem of London, speaking in his quiet steady way to Ambrose, who only half-listened, distracted by a child in a fairy costume sitting on a doorstep and smoking a cigarette. ‘He has joined the Socialist League, and talks of commissioning a little something from William Morris. Martha – let him down easy, won’t you?’ The fairy child stubbed out her cigarette and began another; her wings shed a feather and shivered.

Martha, stirred with guilt, said crossly, ‘Can’t I just be friendly, and that be that? He’s not a puppet: he thinks well enough for himself, listen –’

‘All the new housing on the Thames Embankment,’ Spencer was saying, ‘that they were so proud of, and use as proof of progress: have you seen it? Little better than cages. They’re packed in there tighter than they ever were – some rooms have no windows and those that do are hardly bigger than a stamp – they wouldn’t house their hounds so badly.’ He couldn’t resist a glance at Martha, who came near and let her temper get the better of her.

‘Charles – look at you – you can’t wait to go home, to Katherine and your velvet slippers and your wine that costs more each sip than they must live on for week. You think them a different species – that they brought this on themselves because they’re immoral or stupid and that if you gave them something better they’d trash it in a week – well: perhaps they are a different animal from you, because while your kind grudge each penny of your tax, here if they had nothing they’d give you half of it – no, Luke: I won’t stop – d’you think because Cora taught me which fork to use for fish I’ve forgotten where I was born?’

‘Martha, my dear’ – Charles Ambrose had maintained fine manners against far worse, and besides, he knew well enough when he’d been found out – ‘we all know your point, and admire it. I’ve seen enough, and if you let me return to my natural habitat I’ll do what I can to carry out your every command.’ Seeing that his ironic bow would do nothing for her temper, he said, as if confiding state secrets: ‘The Bill has been passed, you know. The policies are in place. It’s only a question of next steps.’

Martha smiled as well as she could, because Spencer had withdrawn a little, as if suddenly uncertain of his attachment to a woman who’d bellow at her betters in the street, and because Luke had gone impish again, and had never looked more delighted. ‘Next steps! Oh – Charles: I am sorry. They tell me I should count to ten – wait, but can you hear that? What is it – what can I hear?’

They all turned, and heard from deep within a narrow alley the sound of an organ playing. An uneven melody gained speed as someone turned the handle, then became a rousing martial tune. The child ran to meet the music with her wings shivering behind her, and as the organ-player emerged others joined her as if seeping out of the bricks and mortar around them; some were barefoot, and others wore hobnailed boots that struck sparks as they ran; two fair-haired boys carried a kitten each; a girl in a white dress trailed behind, feigning indifference. Charles, keeping to the corners, saw a man of about his own age dressed in the remnants of a soldier’s tunic. Stitched on the breast was the green and crimson ribbon of the Afghan War Medal and his empty left sleeve was pinned at the elbow. With his right hand he turned the organ’s handle faster and faster, and began a jig of his own. The girl in the white dress spun, and laughed, and reached for Garrett’s hand; one boy held his kitten high and sang to it words of his own. Martha looked at Spencer, and saw he was appalled, and despised him for it: perhaps he imagined they ought to be decently miserable in their lot, and not snatch pleasure wherever they saw it. ‘Take partners,’ bellowed the soldier: ‘Try this one for size,’ and it wasn’t a military melody he played then, but with something in it of sailors on deck sighting land. Martha held out her hands to a passing lad who’d discarded his kitten on a doorstep and with great strength in his thin forearms flung her round, so that Spencer saw all her hair fan out, wheat-coloured against the grimy brickwork. ‘Heave me away, my bully bully boys,’ sang the girl in white, ‘I’m bound for South Australia,’ and as she passed Charles she dipped her head, as though accepting a compliment he hadn’t thought to give.

A little distance away, unseen in an alley, Edward Burton’s enemy was watching. Addled with beer and loathing Samuel Hall woke each morning with hatred sharpening in his belly as keenly as any knife. Daily vigils outside Burton’s home had given glimpses of the enemy himself, and of frequent visitors so obviously wealthy it was as if Burton had entered the wards of the Royal Borough a pauper and left them a king. What could they know of his cruelty – of how he’d soured Hall’s sole hope of happiness? Worse, there’d been mention in the Standard of the operation that had cheated Hall of justice: two columns and a photograph in praise of a surgeon who looked like nothing so much as a glowering demon. His hatred for Burton doubled, and spent itself on this other man – what right did he have, to meddle in the ways of God? The knife went in – it had struck the heart – that ought to have been the end of it, and he might have had peace!

And here he was, that same man – black-browed, a little hunched, and with him three companions: a woman he recognised for her thick hair braided at the crown, and two men he did not. Hall had watched them greeted at Burton’s door, and seen them framed in Burton’s window; they’d passed plates of food between them, while Hall himself could not bear to eat – they’d laughed, when he’d forgotten anything but misery! He’d followed them all the way, and seen them dancing, when he himself had lost all joy – Hall put his hand in his pocket, and pricked his thumb on the blade hidden there. If Edward Burton were to remain always just beyond his reach, here at least might be a chance at retribution.

The soldier paused – his arm was tired – in the silence the dancers grew suddenly ashamed. The tenements and gutters seemed all at once more sordid and more bleak; Luke took his arm from the girl’s waist and bowed as if with apology. ‘They brush their hair with codfish bones,’ she sang to the soldier invitingly, but he was tired and wouldn’t play more.

Charles glanced at his watch. It had been a charming display in its way, though perhaps a detail to be omitted from his report to the department; but he wanted his dinner, and before he could reach that happy conclusion to the day he’d need to bathe for an hour at least. And possibly, he thought, only a little ashamed of himself, burn my clothes.

‘Spencer – Martha – have we seen enough? Have we done our duty? – but look here, who’s this? Dr Garrett, he seems to want you: is this a friend of yours?’ He gestured away to his right, and at first Luke saw nothing beside the children dispersing and the soldier counting out the coppers in his cap. Then the child in the fairy wings yelped and swore: she’d been pushed aside in a sudden jostling and tumbled wailing onto the stones. ‘What’s going on?’ said Charles, drawing his coat closer – was it pick-pockets? Katherine had warned him to take care! – ‘Spencer? Can you see what’s going on?’ The group of children parted, a kitten broke loose and yowled from a windowsill, and Charles saw a short man in a brown coat come at them with his head held low and one hand thrust in his pocket. Thinking the man was in distress Martha stepped forward, and held out her hands: ‘What is it?’ she said: ‘What’s happened – can we help?’

Samuel Hall did not reply, only went on running, and they saw it was Luke he wanted; he reached the surgeon, who at first was a little amused, and fended the man off with a jovial shove – ‘Do I know you? Have we met?’

Hall began to mutter beneath breath sour with beer, all the while putting his hand in his pocket and drawing it out again, as if he couldn’t decide what to do next: ‘You shouldn’t’ve gone and interfered with my business – it wasn’t fair – I’ll show you what’s coming to him!’

Luke grew troubled then, but for all his strength could not push the man away: he found himself pressed against the wall, scrabbling at the brick. He cast about for help, and found it – for there was Spencer, who with his hands on the man’s shoulder wrenched him away from his friend. Then the man fell to a kind of drunken sobbing that was also a little like laughter; raising his eyes upward he said, ‘Again, would you believe it! Cheated again of all I’m due!’

‘Poor chap’s quite mad,’ said Charles, watching the man in the gutter. Then he saw him put his hand in his pocket and take out a blade. ‘Watch out,’ he said, coming forward, feeling each hair lift on the nape of his neck: ‘Watch out – he has a knife – Spencer, stay back!’

But Spencer had turned away from the fallen man, and was slow with the shock of the fight; he looked dumbly at Charles, and at his friend. ‘Luke?’ he said: ‘Are you hurt?’

‘Winded,’ said Luke, ‘that’s all.’ Then he saw Hall scrabble to his feet, and how light gleamed on the blade; saw how he raised his arm and lunged at his friend with an animal’s cry. In the long moment that followed he saw also Spencer laid out upon a mortuary table, his fine fair hair falling back against the wood, and it was unbearable: he’d never felt so appalling a surge of terror. Luke hurled himself forward with hands outstretched – he reached the man – he reached the knife – they tumbled to the pavement. Samuel Hall fell first, and fell heavily: his head struck a kerbstone with a sound like that of a nut being cracked.

The soldier had moved on to other alleys, and they heard the organ playing – something like a lullaby, so that the watching children thought perhaps the black-haired man who’d danced with them was sleeping, since he lay so still. But Luke had neither passed out nor been knocked unconscious: he lay there unmoving because he knew what had been done to him and he couldn’t bear to look.

‘Luke – can you hear us?’ said Martha, touching him with gentle hands; he roused, then sat up and turned towards them, and the colour left Martha’s cheek. From collar to belt his shirt was scarlet, and his right hand and forearm were gloved with blood. When Charles came close – having seen that the brown-coated man would certainly never get up again – he thought at first the doctor was clutching a scrap of meat. But it was the flesh of his own hand, flayed from the bone where the knife had crossed his palm as he grasped it, so that it hung down towards the wrist in a thick and glistening flap. Underneath it greyish bones were visible, and a tendon or ligament of some kind had been severed and lay in among the blood like pale ribbon snipped with scissors. Luke appeared not to be in pain, only grasped his right wrist with his left hand, peering at the visible bones of his hand and reciting over and over as if it were a liturgy: ‘Scaphoid – unciform – carpus – metacarpus …’ Then his black eyes rolled backward and he fell into the arms of his kneeling friends.