The Door That Led to Where (7 page)

AJ had never been on a plane, never been to a foreign land; only London muck had ever stuck to the soles of his shoes. He had no idea what jet lag felt like but he wondered if he could be suffering from time lag.

Whatever it was, everything was unreal. Leon, Leon's mum, Slim – all seemed to float about him. He felt sick with tiredness, so much so that he had fallen asleep again on the bus and missed his stop at Stoke Newington Town Hall and had to catch another bus back from Stamford Hill.

Slim was waiting outside the Rose and Crown, uncomfortably puffing on a fag.

‘You don't smoke,' said AJ.

‘Leon's gone missing,' said Slim, stubbing out the cigarette. He stopped and looked at AJ. ‘You all right? You're grey.'

‘Had a hard day,' said AJ, wishing he had been with Leon instead of chasing a mystery he didn't have a hope of ever understanding. ‘What do you mean, gone missing?'

Slim sighed. ‘It's messed up. Auntie Elsie went to the hospital with him and that was when they turned off his mum's life support. The social services were there too. Leon told them he needed a piss and that was the last anyone saw of him. Now the police are round at his flat.'

‘Shit,' said AJ.

‘Yeah, life is shitty, it sure ain't pretty. The vultures have descended. Margot from Ranger Housing Association is up there too. The rent was months overdue. Seems like Leon has lost his mum and his home, all with the click of a switch. His mum was more use as a living vegetable than a bleeding corpse.'

‘Ever thought of being a poet?' said AJ. ‘Come on, we'd better try to find Leon.'

‘I've been looking all day. Down at Blues, on the South Bank – nothing. And I can't search any more, man,' Slim said sheepishly. ‘Sorry, bro, I'm taking my girl out.'

‘What are you on?' said AJ. ‘Leon's mum has died and you are determined to add to the sum total of misery by going out with the girlfriend of the nastiest piece of manhood that was ever assembled in the factory of life. Moses is a basket case.'

‘She's finished with him for good.'

‘I doubt that, bro. I imagine Sicknote is making sure she has one of her Gucci stilettos in each camp. Why do you want to be involved with the bitch?'

‘Don't call her that. I love her. Don't laugh.'

‘I'm not laughing.'

‘You see, I've had this crush on her since –'

‘Since you lost the will to live?' said AJ. ‘Oh, give me strength. There's no cupid's bow waiting for you, mate, just Moses's flick knife and you know it. It's pathetic.'

‘Shut it,' said Slim. ‘Just shut it.' He took out another fag and lit it with an unsteady hand. ‘Got to go.'

Walking towards them, in a gaggle of glittering girls, was Sicknote, the Cleopatra of Stokey, coming to claim her slave.

Slim threw the fag away.

AJ looked on, disgusted, as Slim almost ran to her.

‘Just be careful, that's all,' he said to no one in particular.

Outside Leon's block, AJ found Leon's sofa leaning against the wall along with two mattresses and several black bin bags. His clothes were mixed up with the rubbish. They all stank. So that was that. For what it was worth, Rangers had reclaimed the dump. There was no point in seeing if he could get in. Anyway, it was dark and hard to see with eyes that needed matchsticks to keep them open. He focused on his oversized brogues. One step, two steps, three. He had to put his faith in something and shoes seemed a good bet. He saw Moses's gang hanging out in the doorway.

Keep your eyes off those geezers and concentrate on the shoes, he thought. They were moving in the general direction of Bodman House. He rang Elsie's bell.

Dear old Elsie. London may tumble, St Paul's might crumble but Elsie would always be there. She'd been just a little kid during the Blitz, had seen the houses round about go down. She even had an Uncle Stan who had been shot by a Stuka on Church Street.

‘He was a stubborn bugger,' she'd said. ‘He wouldn't lie down on the pavement when the plane flew overhead – he just stood in the road with his fingers in a V-sign and, lo and behold, if that Stuka didn't double back and shoot him full of holes. No one else, just my Uncle Stan. Daft as a brush, he was.'

Elsie opened the door.

‘Give me those,' she said, taking his smelly clothes. ‘Cup of tea? You're all done in. What a day, what a day. I take it you haven't seen Leon?'

‘No. I'll have the tea and then I'm going out searching and I will find him.'

The idea that you could just boil water and make tea at the flick of a switch struck him for the first time in his life as a luxury. Maybe you needed to see the past to appreciate the present.

Elsie, the queen of the practical, put both hands on her hips. She had just had her hair dyed blue and the tightness of her curls and the lines on her face made her, in the dim light of her lounge, look beautiful to AJ.

‘You  … ' she said slowly, as if measuring out each word to see if they had the right amount of weight to them, ‘you are not responsible for Leon or for Slim.'

AJ stood up to protest.

‘I haven't finished. You need to take care of –' Elsie stopped mid-sentence. ‘What are you wearing?'

AJ was too muddled to understand what she was saying. Her words drifted in and out of his consciousness. She showed him into the bedroom that had once belonged to her son Norris.

‘You can stay here for a while, if you like,' she said.

He took off his waistcoat and shirt and lay down on the bed, and before Elsie had brought him tea and Marmite toast, AJ was fast asleep.

The next morning he had a bath and realised that he felt a human being again. A human being with a plan. He would look for Leon after work. He would find him even if it meant tackling Dr Jinx. Elsie was in the living room, sitting in her armchair. The ironing board was out and all AJ's clothes had been washed and pressed.

‘You shouldn't have bothered,' said AJ. Elsie was staring into space. ‘Elsie?' he said. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Where did you find those?' she said, pointing to the shirt and waistcoat Ingleby had given him.

‘Oh – I don't know.'

‘That's what Norris said when I asked him the same question, a week before he went missing.'

‘Norris, your son?'

‘Yes,' said Elsie. She stood up and went into the kitchen. ‘Coffee?'

Some things are so important that getting the right information demands asking the right question. AJ had to give the question some thought. He waited until Elsie had put coffee and cereal on the kitchen table.

‘You mean your son Norris had these very same clothes?' said AJ.

‘That's about the sum of it,' said Elsie. ‘I told the police about them but they weren't interested.' She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Lucas was supposed to come back to live with your mum. He said he just had to sort something out. When he never came back Norris said he would go looking for him. That was the last time I saw my son. And no one ever saw Lucas Jobey again either.'

It had never occurred to AJ that Elsie might have known his father.

‘You knew my father?' He said the words quietly, as if the sound of them might frighten away the answer.

‘I did,' said Elsie. ‘But it was a long time ago.'

AJ opened his eyes on Saturday morning and thought, what a mess. He had looked for Leon every evening after work with no success and today he planned to devote his whole time to finding him. Even as he thought it he knew he wouldn't be able to. Somehow he had to retrieve the papers Mr Baldwin wanted. He dreaded what would happen if miraculously Mr Baldwin was out of hospital on Monday. The first thing the lawyer would do would be to demand the key and the documentation. And the second thing he would do would be to fire him.

‘Shit, shit.'

AJ was wide awake – no long lie-in this morning. He climbed out of bed. He washed and put his suit on over the shirt and waistcoat. There was a clank as a penny rolled out of the waistcoat pocket. It was large and old with a picture of George IV on one side and Rule Britannia on the other. It had the date on it: 1825. This was a good sign. It was the same year as on the stone above the doors to 4 Raymond Buildings.

Heads I look for my best mate and blow the consequences, he thought; tails I go back through Jobey's Door. He felt a longing to be there again, to feel that other London for himself, to walk its streets and be a part of it. He wanted to call on Miss Esme and ask a few important questions. Hopefully she would know where to find the documents Mr Baldwin wanted. And he had this half-baked notion that if he could only speak to her alone the mystery of how her father knew his father would be solved. He tossed the coin.

Tails.

‘Going anywhere nice?' Elsie asked him.

‘Just to look for Leon.'

‘All dolled up like that? I may look like I am missing a spanner, but I can tell a lie from fifty feet and that one is so whopping it almost fills the lounge.'

AJ sighed. ‘There something I have to do. It's all right, it's safe.'

‘As long as it's not trailing trouble behind it.'

Fearing more questions, AJ left the flat with a piece of toast in his mouth and the rest of the clothes Ingleby had given him in a Sainsbury's bag.

‘Don't worry,' he said.

‘I've heard that before,' said Elsie.

AJ imagined it would be a lot harder to get into the car park at Phoenix Place in daylight than it had been at night. What he had discovered working at Baldwin Groat, though, was that a suit, however cheap, put you in a different category. You didn't look like someone who was about to spray his name, lairy and large, on a brick wall.

He followed a worker from the sorting office through the side gate into the car park. A little way off a car alarm began a constant whine.

Gradually he became aware that the needy wail had faded away. A fog enfolded him and the red door appeared, as did the stone face and the hand of the knocker. He almost ran at it, imagining its hinges to be stiff as before, only to find that the door opened with such ease that he almost lost his footing. Once he was in the hall the door closed behind him and he could hear the meow of a cat, the clip-clop of horses' hooves outside but nothing else, only the silence that belonged to a house in another century.

The hall had a fraction more light in it than it had at night. The place felt coffin-still.

‘Hello?' he called.

He was half hoping that Ingleby would be there. He wouldn't have minded a chat with him. He changed his clothes, left his suit and mobile in the cupboard under the stairs and picked up his hat and muffler. He opened the door again. Fingers crossed he wasn't going out into the Phoenix Place car park.

‘Bloody hell,' he said to himself.

He had arrived in the nineteenth century.

A frost had settled over this London and the air was bitter and clear. The city was so transformed in the daylight that it took his breath away. The grey dome of St Paul's loomed through the rolling drifts of murky smoke from a thousand chimney pots.

In his world St Paul's could just be seen from his mum's balcony, dwarfed by the Shard and the Gherkin – the great-great-great-grandfather of London surrounded by its precocious children. Here, Christopher Wren's building stood tall above roof tops, a landmark by which he could take his bearings.

He walked towards Clerkenwell through a London that no longer existed, dawdling, taking it all in. It smelled raw; poverty and grandeur nestled together. The shop fronts were small, some decorated, some undecorated, with nothing to show what they were selling. The noise of the city was deafening. A brewer's dray came along, making more din than AJ thought possible; a sedan chair wobbled past, the passenger a lady with a painted face and a tall white wig, protesting that the porters were too slow. This was the London he'd read about and somewhere here lived his hero, Charles Dickens. He wouldn't have yet written
Sketches by Boz
, let alone
Pickwick Papers
. Dickens must be about eighteen, and if AJ remembered correctly, was working as a reporter.

‘Wow,' said AJ to himself. ‘What a day.'

He laughed when he saw the stagecoaches, beautifully turned out, driving merrily through the streets. There were no traffic lights to stop them. There was no police to keep order. London had a chaos of its own making and it seemed to work. He passed street merchants crying out their wares, things AJ would buy at the local corner shop. Finally he reached St John Street.

He wasn't sure which house it was that Ingleby had taken him to. He thought he had walked past it until a door opened and AJ recognised the housekeeper, Mrs Meacock. She stood for a moment on the front step but didn't notice him. Or so he hoped. Picasso could have had this woman in mind when he made his Cubist portraits, for her face had many sides to it and not one would AJ trust. She glanced up at the first-floor window and so did AJ. There stood Miss Esme Dalton.

He waited in a doorway and only when Mrs Meacock had vanished in the direction of Smithfield Market did he emerge to find that Miss Esme was no longer at the window.

His plan took courage. He would knock on the front door and ask to speak to her. But his courage turned from a bulldog into a chihuahua.

Bad idea. Did he think he could just say, ‘Hi, I was wondering if you know anything about these papers your father had? They're to do with some priceless snuffboxes.'

Even as he said it to himself he realised the whole thing sounded nuts.

‘Gingerbread, hot gingerbread,' shouted a young lad wearing a hat far too big for him.

AJ was about to walk away but, stuffing his hands in his pockets, he found some coins there.

‘Yes,' he said to the boy. ‘One, please mate.'

‘Perhaps you would make that two, Mr Jobey?' said a voice behind him.

AJ turned. Miss Esme stood in the doorway, wrapped in a shawl.

‘Two,' said AJ. ‘And keep the change.'

He wasn't sure if he had underpaid or overpaid.

‘I think you have just bought all his gingerbread and the basket,' said Miss Esme, solemnly.

AJ hadn't properly seen her before. She was tall, willowy, with a face that looked out of place, belonging more to the twenty-first century than the nineteenth. They walked in an uncomfortable silence and ate the gingerbread.

Why had he ever imagined this would be easy? Nothing – past, present or future – is ever easy.

‘Mr Jobey, may I enquire  … ' she said slowly, then stopped and glanced behind her. ‘Mr Jobey, why have you come here?'

‘To buy you gingerbread.'

She smiled and it was a smile that changed her face into something altogether softer, less corseted. Her eyes were a gentle grey in her pale face; her hair hung straight in two heavy curtains that had resisted all attempts to curl them. He had noticed that the fashion seemed to be for ringlets and bonnets.

‘I thought you were about to go abroad.'

‘A last-minute change of plan.' And then he said what he shouldn't have said – it sounded so corny, like something Slim might have said: ‘Can't resist a pretty face.'

That made her smile.

The further they walked away from St John Street the more she began to talk. Then quite suddenly she stopped, and staring at him said, ‘Do you ever think you were born into the wrong time?'

‘Often,' he said, smiling.

‘Truthfully? You are not mocking me, Mr Jobey?'

‘No. I think about it a lot. Which time do you think you belong in?'

‘The future,' she said, without hesitation. ‘I think then women might have lives of their own. Have you read the works of William Blake?'

‘Yes. “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright  … ”'

‘Very good, Mr Jobey, but I was thinking more of his philosophy.'

For a moment he thought she was going to shut up shop and stop talking altogether. Why had he been so stupid? Any fool can quote ‘The Tyger'.

‘Blake talked about doors of perception,' said AJ.

‘Yes,' she said, once more alight with passion. ‘“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.”'

How right he was, thought AJ. Perhaps Blake'd had a door that led to the future. That didn't seem as far-fetched as it would have done a week ago.

‘He writes about freedom,' said Miss Esme. ‘A freedom to be oneself. I tell myself stories about how my life might be. Do you think me mad to believe that in the future there might be hope for women?'

‘No, not at all. I'd just forgotten that Blake  … ' He was going to say ‘was already published' but stopped himself in time. ‘I'd forgotten that Blake was so wise.'

They were nearing Clerkenwell Green. AJ changed the subject.

‘I must apologise – I should have asked how your father is,' he said.

‘He died a few hours after you were last here,' said Miss Esme.

‘I'm sorry to hear that,' said AJ. ‘This is a bit awkward. You see, your father recognised me but I'd never seen him before in my life. Do you know who he thought I was?'

‘He must have mistaken you for someone he used to know.'

‘But why should that have made him sit bolt upright like that? He was terrified.'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘There is much that I didn't know about my father. What I do know is that I didn't like him and the feeling was mutual.'

‘Do you mind me asking why?' said AJ.

She said nothing so he started again.

‘Did your father know a Mr Baldwin?'

‘Oh, yes, the lawyer. He dined with my father shortly before he was taken ill. My father was anxious to amend his will.'

AJ wondered if he'd had a premonition that he was about to join the daffodils.

When they parted AJ was none the wiser as to why Samuel Dalton had been so terrified to see a man he seemed to think was Lucas Jobey. Or how he came to have his photograph taken in the twenty-first century.

In a way AJ no longer cared about the snuffbox documentation. If he was fired, so be it. He would live here, in 1830, near to Esme Dalton. He had spent the best afternoon he had ever spent with a girl. He was thrilled by how she thought.

‘If the world is still turning in two hundred years, I hope it will be a kinder place,' she had said to him.

Oh, Miss Esme Dalton, you could rock my world, he'd thought to himself.

By the time he'd reached the house in Mount Pleasant, AJ had decided that if Mr Baldwin was back in chambers on Monday he would tell him he needed more time to find the papers.

The one thing he knew he didn't want to do was to give his key to anyone.