The Further Adventures of Charles Maxwell-House Esq.
Our plucky correspondent is back at last from Conrad’s dark continent and hot on the trail of Ghosts and Ghouls – with unexpected consequences!
As my taxi blundered away into the city’s nocturnal haze, my beloved St P____ Square was looking at its serene finest. A full moon rose calmly above the trees in the park, and there was no one in sight save the skulking low figure of a scavenging fox which flitted briefly before my eyeglasses. I breathed in the clear night air gladly – having spent the last few months ascertaining the reading habits (or, as I have realised, complete lack of reading habits) of the long extinct MitMitMot peoples of Central Africa, it was good to be back in dear Albion.
Certain that Mrs B had retired given both the unexpectedness of my return and the very late hour, I tiptoed down to the kitchen in the hope of procuring some refreshment. I was in some degree shocked, therefore, to see the said fine lady with her feet up on the kitchen table drinking what can only be described as a pint of sherry and watching the television. You can scarcely imagine the shock writ on her features when she beheld me. (Although this may also be due to the fact that I have cultivated a slightly wispy, though not insubstantial, beard on my travels.)
Her shock showed no signs of abating when we were both distracted by a horrifying scream from the flickering set. Turning thence, I beheld a whey-faced woman fleeing down a narrow stone passageway accompanied by a thick-set, similarly pasty fellow. Both were steeped in an odd light which seemed neither day nor dusk. Expressing my interest in this, Mrs B made haste to explain, in a strange gabbling tone (such as could only be ascribed to the influence of imbibing much drink) that it was the effect of a night camera, as the pair were actually standing in the pitch dark. I enquired as to their reasons, and she informed me in hushed tones that they were trying to find and appease the spirit of a long-dead girl whose sweetheart had been brutally murdered, and who still roamed a stately home in Sussex. I was instantly fascinated. The man, who had strange spiky hair and a thick Liverpudlian accent, suddenly shouted at the top of his voice ‘Murrrda!’ and clutched his neck to the accompaniment of his companion’s enthusiastic shrieks. Now transfixed, I begged Mrs B to rustle up a truffle omelette and to locate my favourite pale ale, whilst I sat myself down in the seat she had so recently vacated to watch the ghostly drama unfold.
As luck would have it, on this particular show (and the two episodes that immediately followed) no ghost was ever seen, although the daring duo and various others did at times feel very cold, heard doors slamming shut without explanation, and even glimpsed some suspicious motes of dust, which they speculated could only have been created by the fitful dead.
Many hours later, having finally taken to my bed, exhausted, I still could not sleep for thinking that if a Scouser prone to hyperbole and an ex-children’s television presenter could contact the dead, I too might be able so to do. Perhaps I could contact literary greats just by hanging around the places they had frequented? Inevitably, the figure of Charles Dickens loomed large in my mind. Was he not permanently on my fantasy dinner party guest list, however so much the other seating arrangements changed? Was he not a troubled soul, prone to melancholy and depression? Had I not always longed to speak with him? He must surely be the most likely spirit to haunt this ‘great (and dirty) city’. Much excited by the prospect of encountering my icon, the next day, following a late repast, I dug out from the attic long-deceased great-great-uncle Gideon Vivien’s old electro magnetic reader. Then having packed a notebook and a few goji berry carb bars [shurely shome mistake? – Ed] into my calfskin satchel, I set off into the deepening gloom of the evening.
My first stop was Westminster Abbey. It had occurred to me over supper that, as the great man had not actually wished to be buried at Poets’ Corner, he might roam at night as a consequence of this flagrant disregard for his wishes. I paced around the outskirts holding up the meter and pointing it in various directions. But I must own that I experienced nothing but a chill feeling, which was only to be expected of a man of my age plodding about at such an hour on damp flags. I stood, froze, listened, tried to feel and eventually began to shake the machine in exasperation. I suppose I must have cut a strange dash in the brightly lit street, for it was at this point that a community officer approached and asked me what on earth I thought I was doing. Whilst I was attempting to explain my purpose he wrested the device from me (which I must own does look a rather sinister gizmo) and gave me sharp telling off. Greatly alarmed that this valuable antique should be in the hands of an ignoramus, who, I feel compelled to add, was not even a proper constable, I twitched it from his loose grasp and ran off down the road as fast as I could.
Only when I was safely on the Victoria Embankment and breathing with the greatest of difficulty did I pause to consider both the Thames’s midnight-black repose and how I had not spontaneously broken into a run for a good quarter century. There were still many people about although the great hands of the clock read ten before the hour of eleven. Observing drunks, women of the night and various ne’er-do-wells, I mused that London had not changed so much; and it seemed to me that Dickens’s world spread before me, only now in bright illumination.
I eventually reached the Strand and wended my way from there to Chancery Lane and the Old Curiosity Shop just beyond. As I walked past the great law courts rising up in Gothic finery I imagined Dickens’s characters roaming the streets and mused on the old site of the Fleet in Farringdon, where poor dear Samuel Pickwick (a personal hero of mine, on account of his ‘indefatigable assiduity’ and ‘unwearied researches’) was incarcerated, most cruelly I must add. By the time I reached the Elysian lower slopes of Mount Pleasant I was absolutely chilled to the bone. There had been not a single flicker on the ancient spirit detector all the long night, no matter how much I shook it near significant locations. Pausing for a moment to tie my lace, I remembered that Dickens’s House was but a shake of a rabbit’s tail away. I reflected that I had, somewhat foolishly, spent too long with his characters, and had perhaps neglected the man himself in consequence. What better way to right this than a nocturnal trip to his lodgings?
Now utterly exhausted, I hailed a hansom cab. We drew up outside 48 Doughty Street, and after a short altercation with regard to some Mauritanian ouguiyas I absent-mindedly offered as payment, I found myself outside the master’s house, shrouded in darkness, which was as to be expected at such a witching hour. But to my immense surprise, I was not alone in my pilgrimage; a crowd of Oriental fellows was standing by the railings in an earnest huddle around a bespectacled young gentleman. I surmised it to be a literary ghost walk, such as are extremely popular in many cities nowadays (I myself enjoyed one only last month in Ouagadougou), and briefly mused that I might have been better to tag along on one in the very first instance! As these doubts momentarily consumed my befuddled brain, the cab swung round to return to the main road and its bright headlights caught me in their glare. (With the help of hindsight, I now surmise that my silhouette must have been rather dramatically thrown on to the side wall of the house opposite.) All at once, there was a noise of great alarm from the assembled group and I was further blinded by the flashes of cameras going off in my face. As I was struggling to recover my bedazzled sight, I heard further shouts followed by the sound of rapidly running feet. I regained my vision just in time to glimpse the diminutive crowd (bar the sincere student who was extremely long in the leg) dashing off round the corner. Quite astonished, I then found myself completely alone outside Dickens’s house with nothing but the roar of the near-by traffic and the unholy orange gloom of the street to serve as company.
I suddenly felt a most powerful fatigue spreading over me. I was utterly bemused as to why these people had fled from me, and I couldn’t feel my toes, let alone the spirits in the air. And on finding the gadget dead as usual, I knew I must go home at once and partake of the soothing charms of a steaming bath. Returning to the main road, I jumped in another cab and was soon back at M-H Towers, disappointed and footsore.
Before plunging into the scalding water I plucked Bleak House from my crammed shelves, and as I contentedly soaked, I realised myself to be immediately more at one with the great man than any amount of nocturnal wanderings had brought me. And unlike those tramping around the capital in its opening pages, I had not been forced to wade through mud on the streets, nor to even entertain the possibility of meeting ‘a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. Chuckling to myself over this description, I happened to look up briefly from the page. Catching a glimpse of myself in my three-mirrored late-Georgian washstand, I started in the most profound astonishment. At once I understood the strange scene at Doughty Street in all its apparent peculiarity. My rather dashing new beard, my bushy, untamed eyebrows, my over-long sideburns and ear hair and the new extreme side parting I was currently experimenting with, lent me more than a passing resemblance to the great man. Indeed, my silhouette was uncanny. Perhaps he had been close at hand after all? But enough! I put all foolish thoughts of ghost-hunting away that evening, and merely promised myself a severe whisker trim and set at my earliest convenience.
Good day to you.
[When is he going back to Africa? – Ed]
