The Fountain in the Forest Read online

  TONY WHITE

  The Fountain in the Forest

  For Sarah

  PREFACE

  During the period leading up to the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, a new kind of calendar was developed by the playwright Sylvain Maréchal and others, and adopted as the official calendar of the République française in 1793 before being abandoned on 1 January 1806. The French Revolutionary (or Republican) Calendar created a new way of measuring time from Year I of the Revolution (which was retrospectively designated as having begun on 22 September 1792): a non-hierarchical and secular system of ten-day weeks (or décades) in thirty-day months, without days of religious or royal significance. Instead, each day of the week was merely designated ‘first day’, ‘second day’, etc. In what became the dominant version of the Revolutionary Calendar, each day of the year also celebrated a different item of everyday rural life (although their precise distribution can vary), whether a herb, a foodstuff, a livestock animal, a tool or a utility: wild thyme, rhubarb, goat and beehive are just a handful of examples. Further, seasonal characteristics were drawn upon in the naming of each of the twelve months. Thus – to take the two best-known examples – Brumaire (roughly late-October to late-November) is derived from the French word for mist, and Thermidor (roughly mid-July to mid-August) from the Greek for summer heat. Of course, these few notes can scarcely do justice to such a rich subject, and readers wishing to find out more about the calendar are directed to Sanja Perovic’s wonderful book (see Author’s Notes), as well as to a multitude of online resources.

  The Revolutionary Calendar was notably resurrected by the Paris Commune in 1871. It has been satirised – including by Alfred Jarry and the pataphysicians, whose thirteen-month Pataphysical Calendar includes the months of Haha, Merdre and Phalle – and been a source of inspiration to writers and artists. The French Revolutionary Calendar is still maintained and observed by enthusiasts.

  Conversions to and from the Gregorian and other calendars are possible, although imprecise, since they depend upon the variant of the Revolutionary Calendar being utilised, and the method for calculating leap years. I therefore make no apology for any inconsistencies or liberties that I may have taken in the pages that follow.

  Tony White

  London,

  21 Prairial 225

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  I

  1: Fumeterre (Common fumitory)

  2: Vélar (Hedge mustard)

  3: Chèvre (Goat)

  4: Épinard (Spinach)

  5: Doronic (Leopard’s bane)

  6: Mouron (Pimpernel)

  7: Cerfeuil (Chervil)

  8: Cordeau (Twine)

  9: Mandragore (Mandrake)

  10: Persil (Parsley)

  11: Cochléaria (Scurvy grass)

  12: Pâquerette (Daisy)

  13: Thon (Tuna)

  II

  14: Pissenlit (Dandelion)

  15: Sylvie (Anemone)

  16: Capillaire (Maidenhair fern)

  17: Frêne (Ash)

  18: Plantoir (Dibble)

  19: Primevère (Primrose)

  20: Platane (Plane tree)

  21: Asperges (Asparagus)

  22: Tulipe (Tulip)

  23: Poule (Chicken)

  III

  24: Bette (Chard)

  25: Bouleau (Birch)

  26: Jonquille (Jonquil)

  27: Aulne (Alder)

  28: Couvoir (Hatchery)

  29: Pervenche (Periwinkle)

  30: Charme (Hornbeam)

  Author’s Notes

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  I

  1: FUMETERRE (COMMON FUMITORY)

  Like any British policeman who had been brought up on the true-crime stories of the early twentieth century, Detective Sergeant Rex King recognised the jagged, hairy leaves and the sickly-looking yellowish and purple-veined five-pointed flowers immediately. It was henbane – Hyoscyamus niger – source of the deadly alkaloid scopolamine. This was the poison that, in 1910, the notorious ‘Doctor’ Hawley Harvey Crippen had used to kill Cora Turner, the music-hall entertainer who had had the misfortune to become his second wife. But what was a substantial and tall-stemmed henbane doing thriving here in the window box of a Bloomsbury pub, rather than in a cabinet of forensic medical curiosities, where it belonged? King made a mental note to let Emma at the Safer Neighbourhood Team know, so they could at least send one of the Police Community Support Officers, or PCSOs, round to have a friendly word.

  With no real powers and little training, PCSOs were sometimes seen as little better than ‘cardboard cut-outs’ by many of their uniform colleagues. They were the butt of seemingly endless variations on the old joke about ‘impersonating a police officer’ and the subject of many a petty cavil, as well as more serious and justifiable resentments. This was perhaps understandable, given the negative impact on pay and conditions, let alone collective bargaining, that the creation of the post had engendered across the force. But the way King saw it, policing wasn’t all blues and twos. Someone had to be out there on dog-shit duty, taking up the slack and covering all the prosaic crap, because there certainly weren’t enough real police to do it any more. And if most PCSOs couldn’t fill out an MG11 to save their lives, it wasn’t really their fault. King knew plenty who would have made good PCs, given half the chance and a bit of training, while conversely he’d had the misfortune to ‘work’ – he used the term advisedly – with plenty of PCs who were little more than ‘coat hangers’ or ‘uniform-carriers’ themselves. PCSOs might not exactly be indispensable, but King reckoned that if the Met or whoever did a Gallup poll, most of the public would rather have them around than not.

  But lethally poisonous plants and PCSOs weren’t the reason that DS Rex King was walking in a half-trot down Lamb’s Conduit Street on this particular Tuesday morning at the end of May. Five foot ten with a forty-four chest, and fit for his age in a pair of khaki Dockers and a white Fred Perry, Rex had unzipped his black Harrington for the first time since before Christmas. The appearance of the sun was usually enough to have him paying an early visit to the barber’s over in Lamb’s Conduit Passage for his usual six-weekly number two, but it wasn’t that kind of day. Response had received a call a couple of hours earlier, when a cleaner at the Royal Palace Theatre on Drury Lane had been alerted to a carrion scent by Tom the night-watchman, who had been meaning to mention what he had presumed was a dead rat in the theatre’s scenery store since yesterday. The cleaner in question was Gertrude Bisika, a grandmother of Malawian heritage who had been granted asylum and indefinite leave to remain in the UK in 1983. She and her now late husband had fled the regime of Malawi’s then self-anointed President for Life, the late tyrant Dr Hastings Banda. Gertrude’s husband had worked in the Malawian capital, Lilongwe, as a private secretary to David Chiwanga, the then MP for the southern district of Chikwawa and one of the politicians killed by Banda in the so-called ‘Mwanza Four’ incident. Hearing news of Chiwanga’s death, supposedly in a car crash on the border with Mozambique, and fearing the imminent arrival on their own doorstep of the dreaded MYP – the paramilitary wing of Banda’s Malawi Congress Party – the pregnant Gertrude and her husband had packed a small bag each and fled.

  ‘A dead rat, hmm?’ she had said. ‘Well, that don’t smell like no rat to me.’ Having worked as a cleaner backstage and front every morning for most of the thirty-odd years since they had arrived in London, Gertrude Bisika had other ideas. She had encountered more than her share of carrion, from mice and rats to cats and foxes and even – in the earl
y days – the body of a nameless meths drinker who’d somehow got into the basement seeking warmth and shelter during the blizzard of February 1991, when a foot of snow had fallen on London in a few hours and icicles had hung along the length of the Russell Street colonnade. When the snow had thawed, so had he. And, oh boy, hadn’t they known about it.

  This time the smell had seemed to be emanating from somewhere along the so-called Long Dock, a corridor that traced the route of a former alleyway linking Russell Street and Vinegar Yard that had once marked the rear perimeter of the Royal Palace Theatre site, but around and over which the theatre had expanded. First when it was rebuilt for the third time and with a larger stage following a fire in 1809, and a century later, when the backstage area was restored again following the stage-house fire of 1908. This expansion saw the theatre annexing neighbouring buildings, yards and tenements around what had formerly been Marquis Court, and roofing over the intervening streets and alleys to create a backstage warren of workshops and storage spaces, dressing rooms and wardrobes, that was almost as large as the auditorium itself.

  One part of the stage house that had needed to be almost completely rebuilt following the 1908 fire was the ‘paint frame’, a workshop where theatrical scrims or gauzes had been hand-painted for centuries, and which – following theatrical tradition – took its name from the frames upon which the gauzes were stretched. Recently it had fallen into relative disuse and now seemed to have been locked up for a few weeks. Gertrude Bisika had wondered if the smell wasn’t coming from there, so she had gone and got the keys from Jane who did earlies on the stage door, and opened it up.

  She was right. And this is where it got personal, and why Rex King might well have seemed more worried by this call-out than he usually would be. Rex King knew the paint frame at the Royal Palace very well, and had visited many times, because for as long as he’d known him the studio had been sublet by his old mate Terry Hobbs. And come to think of it, Terry hadn’t been around for a while.

  As Rex had said to Lollo when the call had come in, he was telling himself not to worry, but it didn’t help much. After all, if you were called to an incident in your mate’s kitchen, it was probably not unreasonable to wonder if he might not be involved. And the paint frame was like Terry’s kitchen.

  He was salt of the earth and a bit of a bon viveur of the old school, was Terry Hobbs, and a drinking buddy of a couple of decades’ standing. They’d met in the early nineties in the Coach & Horses pub on Wellington Street, when Rex had been new to the area and had just started working out of Holborn Police Station. He’d wandered into the Coach by chance, looking for a swift whisky at the end of a tough day, and got talking to some bloke at the bar. That one whisky had turned into a few pints, and since then they had somehow stayed in touch. Not only that, but they’d even managed to meet up every now and then, which was not something you could say about all of Rex’s friends. Sometimes they would meet for last orders at the Coach, if Tel was in his workshop, or at the Duke on John’s Mews when Rex was working late. More rarely this might be preceded by a quick meal, usually to further their ongoing debate about the relative merits of two great London fish-and-chip shops: The Rock & Sole Plaice on Endell Street versus The Fryer’s Delight on Theobalds Road. Each would defend the chippy on his own manor, though Rex did have to concede that The Fryer’s was usually full of plod. If Rex was eating on his own or fancied getting away from police talk for an hour, he’d usually go for something with a bit more spice. Chilli Cool, a Szechuan place on Leigh Street, was a regular lunchtime haunt at the moment, but Rex’s love of Chinese food was not shared by Terry, who, given the choice, liked few things better than to stroll through the streets with a bag of vinegary chips.

  Terence Hobbs had a good memory too, which, coupled with his raconteur’s knack for spinning out epic tales involving local names and faces long forgotten by the rest of the world, made him very entertaining company. A Mark Twain of the Thames, you could buy him a pint or two and Terry would pick up this Aldwych Iliad where he’d left off last time, whether that had been a week ago or a couple of years. ‘Now, where was I, Rex,’ he’d say, pointedly raising his voice as he picked up the pint, ‘before I was so rudely interrupted by that tosspot behind the bar?’

  ‘Yeah, fuck you too, Terence,’ they might say, with a wink; or words to that effect.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ Terry might say, whoever it was. ‘Not my type.’

  Terry’s stories conjured up a pre-regeneration Covent Garden that, if they were to be believed, must have been populated almost exclusively by legendary drunks, entertainers and artistes both celebrated and forgotten. It was different now. Gone were the days when you’d more than likely bump into Danny La Rue walking his golden-palomino chihuahua in the Phoenix Garden of a morning. The props men, the wig-makers and costumiers, the makers of fake noses and other prosthetics, had all left. Some of them, Terry Hobbs included, had lasted a few decades longer than the market traders, but even now many of them were moving out at best, or simply dying off. Blame the money men, Terry would say, because the question driving this change was the one they were continually asking, which went – for example – something like this: Why should my budget shoulder the overheads of having Maury handmake me a wig in the West End, if I can get it shipped from China and pocket the difference? This was a question that didn’t just apply to wigs, of course, but to every aspect of the business, theatrical gauze-painting included. And it was a question to which everyone knew the answer.

  It was why Terry’s business had not been going so well lately either. At least, that’s what he had told Rex when last they’d met a month or two ago. He’d said that he was thinking he might have to let the studio go, that things had been on the slide for a while. Rex had been sorry to hear this, of course. Sorry for his friend, but also sorry for the apparent passing of a bit of showbiz history and magic. Getting to know Terry’s work had been a revelation to him. Visiting the paint frame that first time had been like stepping back to another age, and Rex had suddenly seen the theatre not just as a building or a place, but also as a kind of machine for telling stories.

  The paint frame itself was a narrow space, longer than the theatre’s proscenium arch was wide and stretching up beyond the full height of the stage to a gantried roof and skylights far above. Down the middle of the room, if you could call it that, ran a long line of paint tables, crudely built workbenches that were laden with tins and rags and brushes of all shapes and sizes, and around which the floor was a Jackson Pollock-like accretion of splashes and drips. Running down either side of the space were the frames themselves, enormous wooden constructions that must each have weighed a couple of tons or more, grids of blackened and paint-spattered beams and struts across which would be stretched the gauzes themselves, ready for painting. On Rex’s first visit, Terry and the crew were knocking off at the end of a long few days working on a familiar, romantic view of Istanbul for a staging of the pirate ballet Le Corsaire. It was exquisite work. There were boats and raftsmen in the foreground, a royal barge and a distant Hagia Sophia rising through the mist in the centre of the painting.

  Mug of tea in one hand, Terry picked up a photo from the table, the reproduction they had been working from. ‘Thomas Allom,’ he said. ‘Londoner. Barnes man. Better known as a minor architect and illustrator, but I love these great paintings of his. Been dying to do one for donkey’s years. Sometimes it’s only when you rework it like this, get into the nitty-gritty of it, that you realise just how good they are.’

  The small reproduction of Allom’s painting that he was holding had been gridded off so it could be copied on the larger scale of the gauze. It seemed miraculous to Rex, unfathomable even, that such a faithful copy could have been produced by hand and eye alone, and yet still succeed in conjuring the full richness and dynamism of the original. He looked up at the top of the gauze, twenty feet or more above them, and Terry must have guessed what he was thinking, because he reached for the right-hand edge of the f
rame and with what seemed a mere flick of the wrist sent the whole contraption plummeting down. Rex suddenly understood why there were no ladders. This wasn’t just a trough running along the floor beneath each frame to catch the paint, but an enormous drop into which they could be lowered at will. His vertigo tweaked by the realisation that he was standing on the brink, Rex instinctively took a step back. ‘Blimey,’ he said.

  But that wasn’t all. More than mere visual wallpaper, or simple backdrop, theatrical gauzes had almost magical-seeming properties, which – completing the tour – Terry illustrated by means of a powerful lamp. Lit obliquely from above, the gauze was opaque and the image of Hagia Sophia and the various barges and rafts on the waters of the Golden Horn seemed so dark and substantial that it might have been painted on to board or canvas.

  ‘Now you see it,’ Terry said, before taking the lamp and turning it so that it shone directly at the image, ‘now you don’t.’

  Rex was astonished. Within the pool of light projected by the lamp’s bright beam, the painting had effectively disappeared, the gauze had become translucent, revealing the wooden struts and the brick wall behind it. Looked at one way, the image was there. Looked at another way, it disappeared to reveal the action taking place on the stage behind it.

  ‘Bloody hell, Terry,’ he burst out. ‘That’s amazing.’

  Rex had been right: it was incredible – magical, even. But latterly it had begun to seem that the demand for this kind of theatrical illusion was passing. Projection of an image had never been a substitute for a painting on gauze; the quality just hadn’t been there. But more recent developments in digital technology meant that an image could now be projected on to an unpainted gauze from two sources and synchronised perfectly. And there was something quite intangible about this, the light from two sources, that would be enough to give it the necessary lift and vibrancy, to offer a quality of brightness and detail that a single projector could not. The result may not quite have matched the visual thrill of what Terry with a wink would call ‘a handjob’ – a hand-painted scrim – but it cost a fraction of the money to achieve. Once Terry had needed to employ three or four scene-painters to keep up with demand, working around the clock and painting two enormous gauzes at a time, one on each frame. More recently he had been lucky to get half a dozen a year, he’d said, and even that was dropping off. Now – or the last time they’d met – he’d said he wished he could get one or two, just so he wouldn’t have to get rid of the place.