Bedford Park

by Bryan Appleyard

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

An evocative historical thriller based in one of London's original suburbs. Set in 1912, Bedford Park is not just a London suburb: it is a crucible for enlightenment and modernity inhabited by people who wish to better themselves - and those who should know better. It is a singular place, architecturally sidestepping the modern whilst encouraging those with new ideas to take up residence. Into this mix sails Cal Kidd from America. In a coffee-house he makes the acquaintance of Binks, a man whose occupation in the City is vague but he seems to know everybody. And so Cal meets real-life characters like Maud Gonne and Frank Harris, while Ford Madox Ford, W.B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad appear also. Then Binks is gruesomely murdered, and after never really having to deal with anything in his life, Cal the observer now has to act. The spirit of the age is what makes BEDFORD PARK so evocative, a time when everyone tries to invoke the future but often looks to the past to achieve it. Among the host of vivid characters, the greatest is London itself, a city in a constant state of flux whose centre is journalism. All the detail makes the place exotic and exciting - the marathon at the Olympics in 1908, a ride on the Flip Flap in White City, news being chalked up on dock walls for those who couldn't afford papers, a woman peeling potatoes in the Biosphere cinema in Bishopsgate. London has to comment instantly upon itself or be commented upon, always new and important.

Release date: April 11, 2013

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

Print pages: 285

Sample

I start on this last, the ninetieth, London notebook once the Mizen Head and the whole ragged claw of the Irish coast passes from view.

Cherbourg, Queenstown and then this nothing. A priest took to one of the tenders at Queenstown and, leaving Southampton, we sucked the New York free of her moorings. She missed us by four feet.

‘The power,’ the captain laughed, ‘the power!’

‘One speech! I am going all this way for one speech. But it must be done, it must be done!’

Stead speaks in exclamation marks, a common habit among the Englishmen I have known. As ever, he is delighting in the sacrifices demanded of him by his urgent destiny. His passion contrasts strangely with the gentle shafts of sunlight playing on the starched linen. Everything in this room is both pale and very bright; it is the brightness of the sea. Pale brightness in which I seem to float … It was like this when I left Chicago.

‘Of course, on the subject of universal peace no sacrifice can be too great. Everything wrong in the world is a divine call to use your life in righting it, eh, Cal?’

The linen-muted sounds of lunch hover above the iron-muted thunder of the engines, whose vibrations form concentric circles in my wine. This churning machine keeps us alive on the ocean where we don’t belong, and so much decorative care to hide the effort involved! The cream gilded salon of this steamship is immensely long. Superficially, it is Jacobean in style or, at least, the ceiling is – strange for a modern ship, but the English, I discovered long ago, don’t like things to look like what – or when – they are.

Something in Stead’s last statement awakens me.

‘Universal peace? I thought you were speaking on spiritualism.’

‘Cal, for goodness’ sake!’ Stead cries with kindly exasperation. ‘We have discussed this at length. I am to address the Men and Religion Forward Movement Congress at Carnegie Hall.’

I am sure he is right, we must have discussed this. Stead is two years older than me and looks that at least, thanks to his tumultuous beard and the ill-fitting and uncoordinated clothes of an absent-minded old man, but he acts and thinks as if he were at least twenty years younger. He is holding his own against the clawings of the years more effectively than I. My memory, in particular, is not what it was, but the notebooks preserve the essentials.

I ran into Dora in the street a few days before we sailed and failed to recognise her, the golden hair now dimmed somewhat but the eyes still blue and alert. She was, it seemed, someone who reminded me of Dora. I stared, empty eyed, lost.

‘Oh, Cal, are you quite with us?’

‘Yes, yes, I am so sorry …’

‘Dora.’

‘Dora. I know. Forgive me. Please. Forgive me.’

Then my old heart leapt like a frog as I gazed into her still-dear features. She has not changed. Age, in her, has just brushed the surface … a slight blurring.

‘Forgive you? Oh, Cal. I am so sorry I could not …’

‘I get so distracted.’

‘I know. You must look after yourself, you are very important to us.’

‘Important …?’

Important to them – think of that! I have attained importance but too late, too late! I am sixty-one and, already, I have become an old fool, begging forgiveness from women in the street whose names escape me, and this was a woman I loved … passionately, I latterly realised. But she said ‘important to us’ – whom did she mean? Or perhaps the point was I was not especially, singularly, important to her. She had, at the last, proved that beyond doubt.

‘The Americans still have not come to terms with the matter of Russia; they are a modern people but they are not truly forward looking. They need a little more simple truth if they are to progress.’

Stead is summarising the contents of his lecture, apparently forgetting that I am one of these naive Americans. I need not listen; it is all very familiar.

The sleeve of this coat is worn – there is a distinct shine around the cuff. I have not noticed that before. It is not like me; I was known about town for my fastidiousness in these matters. I always like to feel finished when I leave the house or, today, stateroom. Perhaps it is like me as I am now, an old fool. Frank would say I always was. He has known me long enough – forty years! – and must have amassed a good deal of evidence for the prosecution. What difference does it make? Neither more nor less than Frank’s seductions or Dora’s worried look or Stead’s speech. What difference does anything make? Voyaging to London and, then, twenty-four years later, voyaging home. What difference?

Frank.

Frank is a sentence: subject and predicate. Frank is the doer of what is done to the done to. Ugly, vulpine, potent and yet, here’s a thing I have always found strange, repeatedly he falls ill. So do I. I am frail. I suffer sneezing fits, a swollen face, breathing difficulties. I was, from the first, written off, not a survivor, not fully born into this world, almost transparent in my almost absence. The Colonel’s disappointment with me in later life was merely an extension of his disappointment at discovering he had a transparent son with an enfeebled constitution. It was not the Chicago way.

I accepted this. I assumed I was the sickly – nasty word that! – type. But when Frank is sick it is an afterthought, a footnote to his vigour. Being sick is an aspect of his masculinity. For me, it is effeminacy, a sign of my submission. I would lie down; Frank would buy machines, a pump to cleanse his stomach, a tube to cleanse his bowels, or he would engage in alarming diets and frantic exercise. I think this means he has faith, faith that he is more than his body, which is, to him, a thing in the world, one more obstacle to be overcome. I lack such faith; my body is me, its shortcomings mine. My body is a picture of my soul but Frank’s impatient soul inhabits his thickened body. After our deaths, my body-soul will moulder while Frank, free of mere body, will be haranguing Stead at one of his séances.

‘I watched him on Blackheath – what a moment that was! I loved him and, for a time, I think he loved me. Such greatness!’

Stead has moved on to Turkey and Gladstone. I remember his unconsummated ‘affair’ with Madame Novikoff. Frank thought Stead had looked up ‘affair’ in the wrong dictionary. It is not his failing that, in his innocence, he attracts passionate women, though Frank claims he is more animal than he could ever admit.

‘Stead,’ he once announced, ‘exudes semen through his skin. Ectoplasmic. The women smell it. He doesn’t give lectures, he gives emanations.’

Frank always says too much and I always remember the wrong things.

‘He turned a mob baying for Russian blood into an army ready to march against the Ottomans. We shall never see his like again. He bestrode the nineteenth century like a colossus.’

Stead’s high-mindedness is seasoned with his usual spice of yellow journalism. He sees himself bestriding the twentieth century; then, at other times, there is this gentleness …

Absent-mindedly I reach for my notebook to record this thought. I fill a notebook about every three months and have done so ever since I arrived in London, ninety notebooks ago. They were to form the basis of a book, I used to tell myself. In some moods the book was to be called Titans, in others Lost Titans and, in yet others, Last Titans. In one much darker mood, I considered Chaos the most appropriate title, though neither this nor any of the others sounded like the book I wanted to write – should have written. My American friends preferred London Swells and Agent Pinker, as we knew him, advocated Modern Madmen: The London Set. I pointed out there was no such set and, by the standards recently set by Herr Doktor Freud, they could hardly be said to be that mad.

‘None of that matters, you poor Yankee innocent, think headlines!’ Pinker cried. ‘Reviews! Making a splash of it! Do not be held back by the exact truth of the matter.’

The notebooks remain just that, notebooks, in their special little trunk in the cabin. They will be found one day, doubtless, and I shall be reborn long after my death as a great documenter of this peculiar moment, that monstrous city and that enchanted suburb.

For my pre-mortem existence, they were a waste of time. I shouldn’t have been writing such things anyway. Fordie always told me that ‘the only occupation fitting for a proper man in these centuries is the writing of novels’. I guess fiction is truer than all this modern noise and I failed to be fitting and proper. I should have stayed in Chicago with its fires and the pork bellies. They were true enough.

‘Cal, my friend, are you all right?’

I had passed my hand over my brow and closed my eyes, interrupting Stead’s monologue. I had been, somewhere beyond any conscious strategy, concealing the bad manners of reaching for my notebook. Stead’s eyes, even when, as now, gazing at me in concern, seem fixed on something beyond as if seeing through me – their clarity and penetration forming a sharp contrast with the man’s general dishevelment. This face, for a moment, bewilders and shames me. Stead, of all people, deserves my attention. Stead is not Frank.

In truth, I am not quite all right. I had ordered Fordie’s recommended lunch for both of us from the alarmingly knowing steward. We have had the Colchester Natives and were awaiting the pâté and then the quail with grapes. The Ponte-Canet ’06 already hangs heavy on my brow and the oysters, combined with memories of pork bellies and Frank’s semen remark, have left me feeling faintly ill. The long salon pulses slowly …

‘Forgive me, Stead, merely a wave of fatigue and perhaps the motion of the ship.’

I gesture vaguely in the direction of the Atlantic, which our vessel cleaves at twenty-three knots. ‘Not less!’ the captain had cried.

‘But it is dead calm! I shall fetch a doctor.’

He twists awkwardly in his chair, straining the buttons of what seem to be several waistcoats, seeking the steward.

‘No, no, it’s nothing … the wine … Fatigue often strikes me these days. I lack your inner fires; mine, such as they were, appear to have gone out.’

The words express a familiar failing of mine. I have always favoured discomfort over action. It is a fault that has held me back from so much, from everything, this reluctance to make things better for myself. I suffer in silence, not out of heroism but indolence or, on this occasion, embarrassment. The idea of a doctor bearing a bag bustling to my side in the midst of this crowded room is intolerable – the eyes of people gauging the extent of my decline, the days, hours or minutes left to me. Happily, I am relieved of this anxiety. Stead relaxes and smiles, an action that rearranges his entire beard. He leans over and pats my knee.

‘No, no, the truth is your mind had wandered. I’m sorry I was boring you, you have other things on your mind. You are going home. You are leaving England.’

At the words ‘leaving England’ I see myself in a painting, a noble figure standing on the deck, scarf blown back, a look of fierce courage and concentration on the task ahead. Leaving means this comfortable room, the grand staircase, the monumental furniture, the starched linen, all the accoutrements of a grand English house to ease my passing.

‘Yes, leaving England where so much happened …’ I murmur vaguely.

Stead looks concerned again.

‘I think we should abandon lunch and get you outside.’

He summons the steward, cancels the remainder of the lunch and leads me away. A few heads turn, nothing too intolerable. Outside, he finds me a port-side chair facing directly into the brilliant sun and, as I recline, he tosses a blanket over me.

‘Have rest, Cal, my old friend. Your London years have left you exhausted. No wonder! Twenty-four years is long enough in the maw of the modern Minotaur. You are going home!’

He leaves me, his eyes fixed contentedly on the beyond.

My London years! I sailed to London to learn how to be modern and now I sail back, none the wiser. Yes, I am going home. England is just behind me, America far ahead. The day is cold, bright and clear – there is salt on my lips – droplets clutch at the railings. The ocean wants to claim all things, and will. The ship drives westward, washing me with time passing, with brightness and empty air. I half-close my eyes to blur the people that come and go; the hot, bright knives of the sea and sky cut and melt their bodies. They pay me no attention. How could they? I am only half here. This is what it is like to leave and be left, to become the departed. The pleasant emptiness of the air is all about me. It is emptying me. My feelings have become memories, my memories have become gossamer, ectoplasm, a faint shimmer of the past in the blue, the infinitely blue, clarity of the present. Now, ghostlike, I shall dream for a time – of a girl practising ‘a tinker shuffle picked up in Donegal’ and of Frank. Frank the killer.

I fell in with the very young night clerk at the Fremont House Hotel, not one of Chicago’s finest. More accurately, he acquired me; from the beginning, he was the senior partner in our friendship. He claimed to be nineteen, two years younger than me, though he was, I calculated, even younger, a mere boy, yet it was impossible to regard him as anything other than a man – and a man of the world at that.

Ugly, short and stocky with the ears of a bat, his hairline almost met his eyebrows and his skin was the colour of pork fat. He exuded, however, an irresistible magnetism, thanks to his powerful chest, general muscularity and a certain fierce, canine eagerness in the eyes. He also had a strikingly deep voice that, in moments of excitement, boomed authoritatively across the dark Fremont lobby. His presence could appal, threaten and command even as it charmed.

Erotically obsessed to an extraordinary degree, he demanded details of any sexual adventures I may have had and talked in unsettling detail of what he planned to do with some girl he had seen that very day in the, as he put it, ‘opportunistic streets of Chicago’. I was not persuaded that some of the things he described could be done to or with girls, and, having been raised by a strict father, a stern product of the Second Great Awakening and the Civil War, I was firmly convinced that they should not be done.

From every aspect, my upbringing told me that this Frank was a dangerous degenerate. His very identity was dubious. Though usually addressed as Frank, he also responded to Joe and sometimes to James Thomas. His provenance was uncertain. Though his country of origin was, I assumed, England, it could equally well have been Ireland or Argentina.

The Colonel, my father, had shouldered the burden of warning me against such people the moment my mother died. He was stricken with guilt – his adored Ellie had died alone and desperate, her hands clawing blindly at the brand-new emerald-green velvet drapes while he was distracted by stockyard affairs. In response, Colonel Kidd, a fierce, obsessive though ultimately uncertain man, determined to honour her in death in ways he had failed to do in life.

First, there was the buffalo robe. This was a primitively decorated, heavy and odoriferous object that Ellie, in a paroxysm of nostalgic guilt, had bought for a huge sum at the height of the fashion for the culture of the Plains Indians. The fashion and the guilt passed, the market collapsed and left us with this worthless but weighty garment decorated with tepees, ponies and mystical bird life. After her death, he had it removed from a cupboard and hung it in the dark hallway outside their bedroom, a monstrous, stiffly creased projection into the narrow space. After several months and many applications of some special oil, the creases finally fell out and the hallway became navigable again. The smell, however, remained, filling the house with the faint, sickening odour of death on the prairie.

Secondly, there was me, a less definite form of tribute than the robe. Unable to hang me in the hallway or smell my presence, the Colonel resorted to religion. Never before having been especially observant, now he determined to outdo his late wife in religiosity. He attended church, prayed noisily night and morning and worked tirelessly to ensure the salvation of the soul of their only child.

His inner doubts only fanned the flames of his outer faith. Daily warnings were issued, listing the worldly threats to my character and spiritual condition. These were delivered with an increasing air of panic as I attained adulthood and acquired a tall, slender and, for some, perilously attractive form. I lacked, I knew well enough, presence.

‘You see Cal over there,’ said one acquaintance, ‘but when you get there, there is no one there.’

I did, however, possess, I was often told, elegance. The risks of my appearance were compounded, my father concluded, by the fact that I had no idea of the effect on Chicago society of my own charms. I was an innocent at large in a guilty world.

Generally, ‘loose’ women were seen as the greatest threat to such a man. They extracted, said the Colonel – reasonably enough, I guess – vital fluids. There was the equally pressing problem of the ‘Devil’s Disciples’, villainous men who would wish to lead me astray. They were always, in the Colonel’s fancy, muscular, short and dark. Close examination of their eyes, some minister had told him, would provide conclusive proof of their moral status.

‘Regard their eyes, son,’ he would say, ‘regard them with great care. You will see within the bright, blazing fires of hell.’

I had suffered from panics of my own since the death of my mother and, knowing their cause was not the forces of evil but bereavement pure and simple, I was unconvinced by the fury of Father’s strictures, suspecting they were symptoms of some internal disorder brought on by grief rather than by an accurate analysis of the world beyond our home. That said, it was hard not to conclude that he had a point of some practical import. Chicago really was full of short, dark men with hellish fire in their eyes and loose women were commonplace. To make matters worse, the raging destruction of the Great Fire the previous year had provided respectable citizens like my father with hard evidence that this was indeed a city perched precariously on the very lips of the mouth of hell and that, beneath the dark waters of Lake Michigan, a sea in all but name, demonic forces fought for control of their land.

I conformed to his wishes, my will to do so further stiffened by the ultimate threat that undergirded my father’s warnings – the withdrawal of my inheritance. The city was replete with visible evidence of the degradations of poverty; the broken, struggling figures of the poor disfigured the streets. They would grasp at my sleeve, demanding money but also something much more than that. Periodically they assembled in meeting houses and called for the death of the rich. The Colonel was rich thanks to the pork bellies piled in the Union Stock Yards. I knew he was an angry widower, perfectly capable of cutting me off without a cent if the loose women or the hell-eyes ever got the better of me, or, perhaps, if I attended one of those meetings. Then I too would become a sleeve-grasper or a revolutionary. On balance, therefore, I decided it was safest more or less to live up to his standards.

Occasionally, of course, I did toy with revolt, or, at least, with the forbidden. After the fire, I tentatively explored the blackened ruins on De Koven and Jefferson and savoured the damp, burnt stench as if it were the fumes of the strong liquor against which the Colonel also periodically fulminated. The ruins stood and leaned precariously, like attempts at buildings that had not quite worked and had been abandoned. The city, almost a ghost town, seemed, in my ever dreaming mind, to be a presentiment of an era of destruction, perhaps planned by the poor in their meeting houses. First Chicago would sink into hell’s mouth and then the world.

Pale girls were salvaging what they could from the debris, their skirts tucked up and their white, dirt-streaked legs visible. They looked at me as I passed, as if, I fancied, they were, rather unenthusiastically, offering something. The spectacle stirred me. I imagined – I still do – an encounter with one of these curiously ageless girls. I imagine taking her behind one of the still-standing walls and kissing her, the pressure of her lips on mine, the taste … But I had not got it in me to do it, perhaps I had not the presence. The wall might collapse, I thought stupidly, and such an act would, if discovered, have alarmed and angered the Colonel and set in train a series of events with unimaginable consequences. Such was my cowardice and such the moral and financial brink on which I feared I was destined to live out my days. Yet suddenly, there was this Frank at my back, pushing me to the edge.

The weak point in my moral defences was that they were not moral at all. They were constructions of psychological frailty and economic self-interest that, like the burned buildings, leaned precariously. It was so overwhelmingly in my pecuniary and social interests to conform to the Colonel’s demands that I simply did no. . .