The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Read online

  The Mill for Grinding

  Old People Young

  Glenn Patterson

  For Miranda

  Who made sure I was awake

  “To the old, the new world of Belfast around them is generally too great for their grasp or comprehension.”

  “The fleeting show moves on without intermission.”

  George Benn, A History of the Town of Belfast,

  Vol. II, 1880

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  A Short Note on Some Long Names

  I

  Friday, 24th December 1897

  II

  Saturday, 25th December 1897

  III

  Monday, 27th December 1897

  IV

  Friday, 31st December 1897

  V

  POSTERITY know ye

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  By the Same Author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  A Short Note on Some Long Names

  George Augustus Chichester, 2nd Marquis of Donegall, Knight of St Patrick, was more often referred to as Lord Donegall.

  George Hamilton Chichester, 1st Baron of Ennishowen and Carrickfergus, the Marquis’s first-born son, was known by the honorary title of Lord, or the Earl of, Belfast.

  I

  Friday, 24th December 1897

  The telephone rang this morning.

  Despite having rehearsed with me how to behave in such an eventuality, Mrs Mawhinney ran through the house, banging doors and calling my name, as though pursued by the hounds of Hell. In truth I was alarmed enough by it myself – I had been leaning forward straining to catch the final bars of “L’île inconnue” from a cylinder worn almost smooth from playing – that I dropped my spectacles on to the carpet as I started from my chair. In another instant I had trodden on them.

  Mrs Mawhinney all but collapsed through the library door, collected herself, backed half out, and was making to knock as the ringing at last stopped.

  I told her, please, to come in, take a seat, calm down.

  The suddenness of the thing . . . she was saying between breaths . . . it had “put the heart sideways” in her.

  I showed her my glasses. The bridge was bent and when I tried to straighten it I heard the faintest of creaks. Mrs Mawhinney would have had me let her go at once to Lizars, but with Christmas Day upon us there seemed little chance that her haste would be rewarded. Besides, I remembered some years ago having consigned a second pair to the back of a bureau drawer. They would tide me over to Monday.

  We waited together another half an hour, going through the drill several more times, before resuming our occupations.

  I was right about the bureau, but not about the drawer: the spectacles were in the fourth one I opened. The lenses were a little dulled, my eyes more than a little weaker than when last I put them on, but so long as I held my book to catch the light coming in at the window – I had given up on the musical accompaniment – I could see well enough to read. (I have left them aside as I write this: the hand, I trust, after all these years, does not require such close scrutiny.) I held the book for two pages then lowered it and allowed my eyelids to close.

  Towards luncheon the telephone rang again. I had managed half of the stairs, without the aid of my stick, before Mrs Mawhinney appeared in the hallway from the kitchen. She looked up at me. I nodded and her hand went out decisively towards the box bracketed to the oak panelling. She dropped a curtsy (unrehearsed) as she spoke my name then dropped another as she turned to me and said, “Mr Erskine, sir.”

  I negotiated the remainder of the stairs and took the earpiece.

  “Well, well, well, what do you make of this?” said Erskine, with the pride of an inventor, or at least of a privileged custodian, reprising the role he had last performed when he presented me, on my birthday, with the gramophone, and the Berlioz cylinders that I now have to accept have been played out.

  “Remarkable,” I said, as I had said then, and meant it every bit as much. His voice this morning might have been coming from the next room and not the far side of the river.

  Mrs Mawhinney was still in attendance. I signalled to her that I was quite all right.

  Erskine, meanwhile, was inviting me to dinner at the Reform Club this evening – “unless you have already made another arrangement?” It was kind of him to allow me the possibility of refusal, even though he knows as well as any man living that I would not otherwise have crossed the doorstep from now until New Year, nor been troubled by anyone approaching it, save possibly Erskine himself.

  He was getting up a little party for his nephew, who was recently returned from a visit to London, in the course of which he had made photographs of the places alluded to in Mr Wells’s “scientific romance” The Time Machine, which caused such a sensation when it was first published – what, a year, two years ago, now? These photographs the nephew had had turned into slides, which he intended to project by means of a magic lantern. It was all very short notice, Erskine realised (again the opportunity to refuse if I wished), but he had only heard late last evening that the room had become free at the club. He could send a carriage if I wished it . . .

  Mrs Mawhinney was none too pleased when I told her I had accepted. (Mrs Mawhinney, as I have noted, I am sure, many times previously in these pages, is not endowed with a face for dissembling.) She had a pair of sole fresh delivered.

  I told her they would keep to breakfast.

  She had a haddock for breakfast.

  “It is Christmas, we will have both,” I said.

  I will be sorry in the morning that I did. They do not stint on their courses, or their portions, at the Reform Club. The smelts, with which we began, would alone have made a decent dinner for Mrs Mawhinney and me.

  An audience of nine, not counting Erskine and his nephew, gathered in the Antrim Room afterwards with their port and cigars. I knew them all. In the case of most of them I had known their fathers (Erskine’s being a notable exception), in the case of some their grandfathers.

  A large board with a tablecloth tacked to it had been mounted on two chairs against the back wall. There was some business with the electric lights, which even two years after they were installed are the cause of some confusion and, on occasion, misgiving among staff and members alike; that switching off the lights, for instance, might cause a permanent disruption to the supply, or, worse, electrocution. Off, though, eventually, they went. (Switch-throwers happily unharmed.) The nephew himself oversaw the drawing of the curtains – they had to be “just so” – before declaring that we were ready to proceed with the slides.

  We saw the park in Battersea, we saw Lavender Hill; we saw, as an aside, the new Battersea Bridge, the last of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s grand designs. (I knew Bazalgette, too; visited him once in Morden. He talked for two solid hours about sewerage.) We saw the wrought-iron entrances to several of the underground railway stations and listened to Erskine’s nephew’s ingenious equation of these with the burrows wherein the Morlocks dwelt; we saw the South Kensington Museum, the Alexandra Palace at Muswell Hill – Wells’s “Palace of Green Porcelain”.

  The final photograph accompanied the passage in which the Time Traveller and his companion Weena proceed over a hill crest towards Wimbledon as the “hush of evening” creeps over the world. There was an answering silence in the Antrim Room as Erskine’s nephew read of that great pause that comes upon things before dusk, when even the breeze stops in the trees. So vivid were the trees in the photograph – they had been tinted by hand – that I fancied our breat
h would have set their leaves moving, had any of us been breathing out at that moment. Erskine’s nephew continued to read. His voice had a grating quality, but Wells’s words got the better of it, impressing themselves on my memory: “To me there is always an air of expectation about that evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty, save for a few horizontal bars far down in the sunset.” (These too with a tint applied to them.) “Well, that night the expectation took on the colour of my fears.”

  For nine people we gave a rousing round of applause. For eight people they did, I should say, at least to begin with. I remained staring at the blank tablecloth for some moments after the lights had been switched on in the room, remembering how the story ran on: the loss of Weena, the Time Traveller’s desolation on his return, alone, to his workshop in Richmond.

  When all the congratulations had been extended, all the questions asked about the equipment the nephew had used and the chemical processes he had employed – an inquisitiveness in matters of equipment and processes of one form or another being what had brought most of those present into membership of the Reform Club: them and their fathers and grandfathers – the discussion moved on to the future of our own city. (Thompson: “Perhaps at the end of eight hundred thousand years we will at last have our new City Hall.”) Erskine, whose own career, and fortune, has been founded on the knack of never missing anything, tried to draw me into the conversation. Given the changes I had witnessed in my own lifetime, did I not think it foolish in the extreme to speculate on even eighty years hence? I replied that I sometimes felt as though it would be presumptuous of me to speculate on even eight weeks hence. “Nonsense, you will outlive us all,” he said. In which case, I said, it would be our mutual misfortune. Rev. Dr Cathcart said, as he was after all bound to say, that we none of us knew the day or the hour – “no, not the angels of heaven,” as the Apostle would have it – and reminded us that there was still a large body of opinion that would robustly contend with Mr Darwin that the world had seen, or would ever in the future see, the multiple thousands of years that had so fired the imagination of this Wells.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but the nephew cut across me. We were, with the greatest respect, rather straying from the point. He was of the firm opinion that the city was on the brink of a new Golden Age. The genius of our manufacturers, the skill of our workforce, had made Belfast a byword for quality and innovation. He spoke of the Cymric and her sister, the second Oceanic, construction of which, we would be aware, had already begun on the Queen’s Island, not a mile from where we were talking, and which, when completed, would exceed in length Brunel’s Great Eastern. (Exceed it too, it was to be hoped – between the maiden-voyage explosions and run-ins with rocks – in good fortune.) The one-thousand-foot liner was no longer a possibility, it was an inevitability for the Belfast shipyards, and let the competition try and catch them.

  Never mind one thousand feet, Thompson said, if the rumour was to be believed the one-million-pound liner was already with us. Rodgers, at the rear of the room, said through that wheeze that has become habitual with him that if ships continued to grow at the rate they had grown in the last fifty years then by the next century’s end we would be crossing the Atlantic on vessels a mile long . . .

  My dinner was sitting heavily in my stomach – I really do, as a rule, eat so little these days – and now that the conversation had become general I thought that Erskine would not take it amiss if I asked to have the carriage brought round for me. It was not quite half past nine o’clock. Erskine himself saw me down the stairs (watched me, I should say, his eyes never once leaving my shoes) and out on to the kerb. It was all I could do, after he had handed me up into the carriage – it was a new-model brougham – to stop him tucking the blanket around my legs. He thanked me for coming; told me that he hoped his nephew’s manner had not been too irksome. It was a common failing in the young, imagining they were the first ever to think or feel these things.

  I thought to tell him that it was considered a failing when I was young not to have built a church or written a history by the time you were twenty-one; then thought better of it. “There are far worse failings,” I said instead.

  He put his hand on the door as the driver gathered the reins for departure.

  “You know you would be more than welcome, tomorrow . . .”

  I stopped him. He makes the same offer every year, and every year, I am sure, I make the same reply: “It is terribly kind of you, Erskine, but Mrs Mawhinney has all the preparations made.”

  Mrs Mawhinney, in fact, is under strict instructions – this year, every year – to take herself off to her cousin’s as soon as we have finished breakfast (haddock and sole!), and not to return until Boxing Day.

  Erskine lifted his hand from the door in a gesture of surrender, or farewell, and the driver snapped the reins.

  “If you change your mind you can always telephone,” he called after me, down Donegall Place.

  The street, despite the hour and the locked metal gates across the doorways, was as thronged as on a summer Saturday afternoon, the shop windows almost as bright. (I glanced higher up, would have sworn I caught sight at a top-floor sash window of a ghostly face, looking out.) Before the builder’s hoardings where a year ago the White Linen Hall stood and where eight, or eight hundred thousand, years from now will stand the City Hall, fir trees and mistletoe were still being sold, and as the carriage turned down towards the Academical Institution I witnessed a group of boys – perhaps from the “Inst” itself – trying to hoop-la with a holly wreath the statue of the Rev. Henry Cooke. That gentleman, of course, had been no friend to the school in life, which is why it is supposed his statue stands with its back to it. A stream of pedestrians was coming towards this group, loosed on the night by the Grand Opera House, where the pantomime had just ended: Dick Whittington, if memory served. On an impulse I leaned forward in my seat and asked the driver, worthy citizen, to turn about and take me back the way we had come. He thought by this I meant that I had forgotten something at the club, but as we came again into Castle Place from Donegall Place I told him to carry on, up Royal Avenue, on, at length, to York Street, thence – turning right at Ship Street, right again – into the narrower confines of Sailortown.

  The driver slowed the horse to a walk. Some of the rooftops here reached to not much higher than the crown of his hat; hardly a one of them had its full complement of slates, a chimney not in need of repair. He cast a look back over his shoulder at me. I urged him on – please – a little further and then a little further again until we had come out at last at a patch of waste ground below Garmoyle Street, looking across the Victoria Channel to the Queen’s Island and the Harland and Wolff yard. “Here,” I said.

  The driver helped me alight. “You don’t mind if I stay by the carriage?” he asked. The sound of its wheels had drawn several patrons out of the public house on the corner of the street. They gathered beneath the solitary functioning street lamp, watching with the driver as I made my hesitant way to the water’s edge. Weeds had pushed up between the cobbles, mingling with the coal dross and the rusting iron and the remains of a thousand crates that had somehow fallen, just here, from ships coming in to dock.

  “Sir?” said the driver, a caution dressed up as a question.

  He may have had in mind the story, in the papers of late, of the woman who ran the length of the Newtownards Road to throw herself off the Queen’s Bridge, a little upriver of us, her body, despite much searching of the shoreline, yet to be found.

  “I can manage, thank you,” I said, gratitude wrapped around rebuke. I steadied myself with both hands on the head of my stick. The fog that has been wreaking such havoc this past week along the coast of Scotland had been halted somewhere out in the North Channel by winds blowing across Belfast from the south-west. My view, notwithstanding the paucity of street lighting, the dulling of my lenses, was tolerably clear.

  A voice called out from beneath the lamp, “You down to see the big boat, M
ister?”

  I waved a hand – “yes” – and peered out as though searching among the masts and the gantries for the Oceanic’s slipway, but hoping instead for a glimpse of something that predated the first ship to bear the Oceanic name, the whole White Star line, Harland’s yard, the Queen’s Island itself.

  Behind me, the driver cleared his throat; asked if he might smoke a cigarette, “for warmth, like.” I realised that in the time I had been standing there a fine rain had begun to fall.

  I told him I had no objection whatever, then, seeing the flare of the match, catching the scent of tobacco on the air, asked if I might have one, too. For companionship, like. He offered me the package – Gallaher’s Green – and I hesitated on seeing there were only two cigarettes left in it, but he shook his head to say I was not to let it concern me. I pinched the end of the cigarette between my forefinger and thumb while he struck the match, so that when I inhaled the shaft was drawn back to rest against the tip of my nose. It had indeed been a very long time since I had done this. The smoke was as sharp as grief, as searing as desire. My thoughts turned liquid and I felt for a moment that I had actually begun to fall. I leaned more heavily on my stick; inhaled again, deeper; inhaled again, deeper still.

  When there was nothing left to inhale I let the ember fall, to fade between my feet.

  “The world is too good,” I murmured and touched my fingers to my lips. The driver was watching still. I plucked at a phantom shred of tobacco. He turned away. I allowed myself a few seconds more then picked my way back to the carriage.

  “Thank you for the cigarette,” I said as he helped me into my seat.

  Our audience beneath the street lamp had dwindled to two women in shawls. One of them asked me was I some sort of Yankee.