1. The Patients The Patients "BY MEANS OF certain myths which cannot easily be damaged or debased the majority of us survive. All old great cities possess their special myths. Amongst London''s in recent years is the story of the Blitz, of our endurance." Setting aside his antique fountain pen David Mummery pauses to stick a newspaper picture of the Temple beside the article he is preparing which will again be favourable to the City''s freemasons and must surely guarantee his entrance into their brotherhood; then London''s subterranean secrets will at last be his. Mummery wets his lips with a blue flannel. Lately his mouth has been dry all the time. Calling himself an urban anthropologist, and with an impressive record of mental illness, Mummery lives by writing memorials to legendary London.
Peeling dried glue from his swollen fingers, he glances up at the brass-bound mahogany clock with a mercury pendulum which blends into a wall of miscellaneous but chiefly patriotic images and, lifting the lid of his nineteenth-century clerical desk, replaces the notebook beside an old ear-trumpet which holds his pens. As he gets up he begins to sing what is for him almost a lullaby. Blake, in the main, has a calming effect. "Bring me my bow of burning gold." A crowded museum of ephemera, of late Victorian advertisements, Edwardian crested ware, ''20s and ''30s magazines, wartime memorabilia, posters from the Festival of Britain, toy Guardsmen, Dinky delivery vans, lead aeroplanes, his room''s surfaces are covered by confused and varied strata, uncatalogued and frequently unremembered. Mummery can explain how these are his sources of information, his revelatory icons, his inspiration. At the centre of this great collage is a framed newspaper photograph of a V-Bomb flying over London. This is Mummery''s private memento mori .
He believes it might even be one of the two which almost killed him as a child. He glances past stacks of books and ancient board games on his window sills to the thinning mist outside. Almost invisible, the low December sun is dimly reflected by the cold slate of terraced roofs. After reaching his hands towards the embers of the small fire he lit at dawn in the black cast-iron grate he opens the doors of an old Heal''s wardrobe and begins methodically to dress in four or five layers of clothing; lastly adding a large black bearskin hat to expose only a hint of pink flesh and his unusually bright eyes when he lets himself out onto the dowdy landing and runs downstairs to leave his lodgings where Maida Vale borders on Kilburn and catch his Wednesday bus. Lately he has been feeling painfully cold. The V-Bomb moves with steady grace before the blustering East wind as it crosses the channel and reaches Brighton, passing low enough over the town for people in the Pavilion Gardens to see it rush by, the yellow fire from its tail glaring against the broken cloud; it will reach Croydon in minutes then in a further minute South London when, its fuel gone, it will fall on the suburb where David Mummery, almost five years old, plays with his toy soldiers. Forty-seven feet long and carrying two thousand pounds of explosive, this sophisticated machine, the combined genius and labour of amoral scientists, serf technicians and slave workers, is about to bring a miracle into my life. David Mummery is also writing his memoirs.
Some of these have yet to be made coherent; some are still in his mind. Some he has considered inventing. Small and bundled, Mummery presents a shapeless profile as he walks rapidly beneath dark leafless planes to his stop, congratulating himself that as usual he is a few minutes ahead of the main rush-hour crowd which must soon begin its progress up a high street already roaring with traffic from the suburbs. It gives him familiar satisfaction to be only third in the queue when the throbbing scarlet double-decker draws in for its passengers to mount. Finding himself a downstairs seat two rows back from the driver''s cabin he rubs a neat circular spot on the fogged window, peering out with quirky pleasure as the bus approaches grey, unthreatening Paddington. Frequently Mummery imagines the city streets to be dry riverbeds ready to be filled from subterranean sources. From behind the glass he watches his Londoners. This fabulous flotsam .
They come from Undergrounds and subways ( their ditches and their burrows ) flowing over pavements to where myriad transports wait to divert them to a thousand nearby destinations. The mist has dissipated. A cold sun now brightens this eruption of souls. Through streets enlivened by their noise small crowds flow: through alleys and lanes and narrow boulevards. At this distance Mummery loves them: his impulse is to remove his woollen gloves, reach through his overcoat, his muffler, his jacket, his cardigan, find his notepad and record how the sunshine glitters off worn stone, new concrete and dirty red brick, off frozen flesh; but he makes his hands remain at rest in his lap: presently he has no need of scenery: he must devote himself to the Masons. Having delivered his latest manuscript ( Five Famous Whitehall Phantoms ) to his publisher on the previous Monday he is free from any immediate financial considerations and now desires almost painfully to be back near his canal and his old women, with his personal nostalgia. As the bus passes a curved metal railway bridge and runs under a white flyover he thinks of the millions of predestined individuals driving or being driven in a million directions, their breath, their smoke, their exhausts softening the sharpness of the morning air. Momentarily Mummery feels as if London''s population has been transformed into music, so sublime is his vision; the city''s inhabitants create an exquisitely complex geometry, a geography passing beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics: nothing else makes sense of relationships between roads, rails, waterways, subways, sewers, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, aqueducts, cables, between every possible kind of intersection.
Mummery hums a tune of his own improvising and up they come still, his Londoners, like premature daisies, sometimes singing, or growling, or whistling, chattering; each adding a further harmony or motif to this miraculous spontaneity, up into the real world. Oh, they are wonderful like this, today. ". but she''s only a beautiful picture, in a beautiful golden frame!" An old song as ever on his delicious lips, Josef Kiss mounts the footboard of the bus, much as a pirate might swing himself into his victim''s rigging. Eccentric clothes swirl about his massive person. Advancing into the body of the vehicle he appears to expand to fill up the available space. He plucks off his leather gloves, unbuttons his Crombie, loosens his long scarf. Watching him partly in reflection, partly from the corner of his eye, Mummery half expects Josef Kiss to hand the garments to his conductor, together with a generous tip.
Mr Kiss places himself across the left front seat and sighs. As a matter of principle he makes everything he does a pleasure. At Mr Kiss''s back an orange-haired woman with chapped skin and a nose rubbed red by coarse tissues reassures herself, speaking to her friend: "I thought I''d better see the priest. It couldn''t do any harm. Well, I saw him. He said it was all nonsense and I wasn''t to bother myself about it and to have nothing to do with Mrs Craddock. That suited me down to the ground." Really lovely eyes and hair but she''ll kill herself at this rate.
"All aboard, please. There you are, love. Mind that bag, sir, if you please. Thank you, thank you very, very much. Thank you, sir. Thank you, madam. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much." With insane patience, his face hanging in regular folds under his grey hair so he resembles a natty bloodhound, the conductor scurries about his aisles and stairs.
"Cheer up, love, it''ll all be over by Christmas. There''s going to be a whip-round for my retirement. Keep talking, that''s the secret, Mr Kiss. You know that as well as I do." He speaks in a quiet moment between Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill. Grey, massive houses, monuments to the optimism of the late Victorian bourgeoisie, once multiple-occupied, the background to a scandal which destroyed lives and careers and rocked a government, slowly being reclaimed from the exploited immigrant by the upwardly mobile whites, go slowly by on both sides, behind trees. "But this is nothing. The tourist routes in the summer are murder.
They never know where they''re going. You can''t blame them for it, can you? Imagine what we''d be like in New York. Or Baghdad. And how''s your sisters?" "Hale as ever, Tom. Oh, very well." "I thought that was where you were coming from. Give them my best when you see them. Tell them I miss them.
Tell them I''m retiring. I''ll be in Putney, though. Not too far." Tom winks as he steadies himself on the vertical chromium rail before the bus takes a lumbering turn, putting the renamed cinema and the Bhelpuri House at its back. Both will be gone in a year, making way for some empty title, a new development. "They say they can''t afford London Transport any more, Tom." Josef Kiss regards their surroundings with the greed of someone who has regretted too many disappearances and losses. His gentle smile suggests resignation.
The conductor shifts his money bag in order to sit down on the seat across from Josef Kiss. His response is to chuckle. His chuckling helps him maintain his equilibrium. "They could buy and sell the Duke of Westminster." Mr Kiss''s smile indicates a broad c.