The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,46

briefly and rather nonchalantly, as if they were discussing the weather.

He took his accustomed route, passing south of St. Paul’s in the direction of the river. The usual array of traitors’ heads adorned the spikes above Temple Bar, and the usual enterprising characters were offering spyglasses for rent to any passersby who might be taken with a fancy for a closer look at the features of the decapitated felons. In Benton Street he passed a water cart, pulled by two hollow-ribbed horses. A ragged fellow was sprinkling water outside the shopfronts to lay the dust—the shopkeepers would generally give a halfpenny for the sweetening of their premises.

The smell of the wet dust came to him as he rode by. The water brought out a sort of impure sweetness, a compound of dust and warm cobbles and sewage, recalling to him scenes of childhood, his parents’ house in Liverpool, in Red Cross Street. On summer mornings the servants would bring out buckets from the houses to lay the dust, and it was as though the water released odors of lime flowers from the trees lining the little square and pastry smells from the houses and the muddy smell of the Mersey, not far away.

Thoughts of the Mersey brought memories of the docks to his mind. He had sometimes gone with his father to see the unloading of the raw cotton. Smells of tar and molasses, and the smell of the slave ships waiting to be loaded with trade goods, a smell unlike any other, a dark odor of blood and excrement; the timbers were impregnated with it, no amount of scrubbing or sluicing had been able to take that smell away. It had not even been necessary to visit the dock for it, he suddenly remembered; at times it had lain over the whole town. On certain days in summer, with the breezes coming from the west, it had invaded the houses, dark, indefinite, all-pervasive, entering parlors through open windows, contending with the scents of flowers in the gardens.

It had been the reek of all captivity to him as he grew up. Neither he nor his father had ever had doubts about the legitimacy and commercial desirability of buying and selling Africans. The trade had brought an influx of capital to Liverpool and to the country as a whole, capital which had helped to fund the nation’s progress in industry and manufacturing. Nevertheless, in his present darkened and disillusioned mood, the oppression he felt at the imprisoning circumstances of his life, the sickness of heart that had accompanied his return to England, it seemed to him that this remembered odor enveloped the whole of London too.

He thought of turning down Sutcliffe Street and following the Embankment for a while. But there was too great a press of people in the vicinity of Charing Cross—more so than usual, as it seemed to him—so he took the more direct route toward the Haymarket. As he neared home, his spirits lifted. In a matter of a few hours now he would be joining Lord Spenton and his party at Vauxhall. He would have an opportunity to take a look at the man and sound him out on the possibility of an agreement between them regarding the leasing of the mines on his land. He would be going unaccompanied, which suited well with his purpose of talking privately to Spenton. But Margaret would not have gone with him even had she been alive; they had followed different courses and kept different company; for a good deal of the time neither, if asked, would have known the whereabouts of the other.

Nevertheless, as he entered the house and felt the accustomed silence of the hall settle around him, he experienced a sort of half-resentful nostalgia. It was at this hour that he had sometimes ascended to her apartments on the first floor and taken tea with her. She had never made any special preparation for these visits of his—her preparation was all for the evening’s entertainments, in which he had no part. He would find her with her hair set in curling pins and drawn back over a little cushion on top of her head, and her face, more often than not, masked with white paste. Fritz, her poodle, and Marie, her French maid, united in hostility toward him. He had felt uncomfortable in the overheated room with its silk drapes and Italian stucco molding. Half an hour was the time allotted for these visits, and he