And soon enough, I was home.
My parents had not been worried, although they were irritated by the orange rust dust on my clothes, by the rip in my shorts. “Where were you, anyway?” my mother asked.
“I went for a walk,” I said. “I lost track of time.”
And that was where we left it.
IT WAS ALMOST two in the morning. The Polish countess had already gone. Now Nora began, noisily, to collect up the glasses and ashtrays and to wipe down the bar. “This place is haunted,” she said, cheerfully. “Not that it’s ever bothered me. I like a bit of company, darlings. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have opened the club. Now, don’t you have homes to go to?”
We said our good nights to Nora, and she made each of us kiss her on her cheek, and she closed the door of the Diogenes Club behind us. We walked down the narrow steps past the record shop, down into the alley and back into civilization.
The underground had stopped running hours ago, but there were always night buses, and cabs still out there for those who could afford them. (I couldn’t. Not in those days.)
The Diogenes Club itself closed several years later, finished off by Nora’s cancer and, I suppose, by the easy availability of late-night alcohol once the English licensing laws were changed. But I rarely went back after that night.
“Was there ever,” asked Paul-the-actor, as we hit the street, “any news of those three boys? Did you see them again? Or were they reported as missing?”
“Neither,” said the storyteller. “I mean, I never saw them again. And there was no local manhunt for three missing boys. Or if there was, I never heard about it.”
“Is the playhouse still there?” asked Martyn.
“I don’t know,” admitted the storyteller.
“Well,” said Martyn, as we reached the Tottenham Court Road and headed for the night bus stop, “I for one do not believe a word of it.”
There were four of us, not three, out on the street long after closing time. I should have mentioned that before. There was still one of us who had not spoken, the elderly man with the leather elbow patches, who had left the club with the three of us. And now he spoke for the first time.
“I believe it,” he said mildly. His voice was frail, almost apologetic. “I cannot explain it, but I believe it. Jamie died, you know, not long after Father did. It was Douglas who wouldn’t go back, who sold the old place. He wanted them to tear it all down. But they kept the house itself, the Swallows. They weren’t going to knock that down. I imagine that everything else must be gone by now.”
It was a cold night, and the rain still spat occasional drizzle. I shivered, but only because I was cold.
“Those cages you mentioned,” he said. “By the driveway. I haven’t thought of them in fifty years. When we were bad he’d lock us up in them. We must have been bad a great deal, eh? Very naughty, naughty boys.”
He was looking up and down the Tottenham Court Road, as if he were looking for something. Then he said, “Douglas killed himself, of course. Ten years ago. When I was still in the bin. So my memory’s not as good. Not as good as it was. But that was Jamie all right, to the life. He’d never let us forget that he was the oldest. And you know, we weren’t ever allowed in the playhouse. Father didn’t build it for us.” His voice quavered, and for a moment I could imagine this pale old man as a boy again. “Father had his own games.”
And then he waved his arm and called “Taxi!” and a taxi pulled over to the curb. “Brown’s Hotel,” said the man, and he got in. He did not say good night to any of us. He pulled shut the door of the cab.
And in the closing of the cab door I could hear too many other doors closing. Doors in the past, which are gone now, and cannot be reopened.
A Study in Emerald
2003
1. The New Friend
Fresh from Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several of the CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both COMEDY and TRAGEDY, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a LIMITED ENGAGEMENT in April, at which they will present My Look-Alike Brother Tom!, The Littlest Violet-Seller and The Great Old Ones Come (this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.
IT IS THE immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.
But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.
I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.
“Astonishing,” I said.
“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab coat, who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave-folk, tortured.”
Put like that, of course,
