Mr. Timothy: A Novel Read Free Page B

minutes after I set my head down, a boy with no shirt tried to pick my pocket; fifteen minutes later, he went for my hat; half an hour after that, I found him very calmly unlacing my shoes. And sometime in the middle of the night, I was awakened by the strenuous sounds of human congress, punctuated by a man's gruff voice:
    --Here, that's my wife you're fucking.

    --It's my wife, ain't it?

    They argued for several minutes, until the woman in question screamed:

    --Christ, will you shut your holes! I got three more in the queue!
    I left early the next morning, without my watch. I wandered into and out of public houses in St. Giles and was fleeced of a couple of pounds by a magsman. Most of that afternoon is lost to me now, but I do know that at just past eight in the evening, I was standing on a street corner in the Haymarket. A tiny girl with no shoes and a great black orb round her eye was pulling on my sleeve, demanding sixpence, and a hansom cab was swerving past me, spraying up a spume of mud, and a troop of gay ladies was passing by, in bonnets and gloves and white silk stockings and dresses turned up just slightly at the bottom, and in this context, they were as beautiful as daylilies. Seraphim lowered by heavenly wires.
    I felt a clap on my back. A slope-shouldered bald man with theatrically guileless blue eyes swung his head round to meet mine.
--Sir, if I may ask, what's a discriminating personage such as yourself wanting with these hags? Seems to me you'd hanker after a more refined class of gal. A woman with je ne sais , you get my drift. Here.
    He handed me a card.

    MRS. OPHELIA SHARPE
Rooms for Gentlemen
No. 111, Jermyn Street
Referrals Required

    --Comfy beds, sir, you can't go half wrong. Just tell 'em George sent you.
    I don't know which was more startling, being offered a houseful of women or being mistaken for a gentleman. I stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, examining myself with a new interest. And it was then that I realised I was still dressed for a funeral. Black top hat, black crepe frock coat, black gloves. Black bluchers. (Someone must have polished the shoes: they were too clean to have borne me on a week's pilgrimage through London.) Father, it seemed, had gone to the furthest possible extreme to make me a gentleman.
    I sniffed at my sleeve: kitchen grease, rat droppings, spit-laden gin. The smell passed all the way through me and then out again, and it took all my concentration not to retch on the spot. I bought a vial of toilet water off a vendor and splashed it behind my ears, beneath my arms. For the breath, I bought a tin of mints from a confectioner, and then I ducked into a pub for a tankard of hot lemonade and gave my hair a quick dousing, parted it again as best I could, and clamped the hat back on top. By the time I reached Mrs. Sharpe's, I was giving off a great cloud of spurious scent.
    The house was easy to find. A quick right off Regent Street and there it was, rearing up from the pavement with an almost comical respectability, a three-story Georgian with ideas above its station, taking on airs as it rose: small cornices over the ground-floor Palladian windows, more elaborately reticulated pediments over the first floor, trumpeting gargoyles over the second, and finally a great gaudy mansard roof, patched with strumpety green and yellow tile and pierced by two breasty dormer windows with lime-green sashes.
    It was a warm evening in June, and all the windows were open and blazing with candles, and the day's last expirations filled the toile curtains and gave them a quicksilver human shape, a teasing dancing odalisque motion. The curtains curled their painted fingers and beckoned me in, and it was such an insinuating gesture that I had half a mind to scale the building, grab the nearest gargoyle, do anything to shorten the distance between us. I settled on the door. A timid rat-a-tat , and within seconds, the oaken slab was being dragged open by a plump, beethaired woman in a