London - Edward Rutherfurd [563]
“She’s playing hard to get,” Herbert told him when Percy consulted him. But Percy was not so sure. It had seemed to him that behind her studiously casual friendship, there lay a fear.
Percy’s lodgings were on the top floor of a house on the slopes near Crystal Palace, overlooking Gipsy Hill railway station and the parkland around the suburban village of Dulwich beyond. The bedroom was tiny, but there was a large, light attic and this he had arranged as his workroom. As he cut, and stitched, and pressed, he could look up, glance out of the window and see right across London, to the hills of Highgate and Hampstead on the other side. It was a long way, there was no doubt about it. Worlds apart, most people would say. With the material progress of the Victorian age, London had strangely become more divided. The separation of the rich West End from the poorer East went back to the days of the Stuarts, but it was only in recent decades that another division had taken place: the split between north and south of the river.
It was the bridges and the railways that had done it. Always before, the river had been London’s thoroughfare. There might have been only one bridge, but there were watermen, literally thousands, to ferry folk across to the theatres, pleasure gardens and other entertainments along the southern bank. As the bridges of the nineteenth century appeared, however, the watermen disappeared and the river slowly lost its colourful life. Then the railways had come, carrying the ever swelling population further and further out to suburbs north and south until now they were even spilling over the distant rims of Highgate in the north and Crystal Palace in the south. The stations – Waterloo, Victoria, Cannon Street, London Bridge – that lay along the river’s banks had covered the old areas like Bankside and Vauxhall with railway lines. And so, as the vast, sprawling metropolis spread even further outwards, the two worlds had slowly separated. Middle-class and clerical folk came in from southern suburbs to work in the City or the West End, but were swiftly carried back to their homes, miles away in suburbs. Labouring men, though there were cheap fares to help them travel, usually lived close by their work, in one or other of the two worlds. And the River Thames was the great divider.
When the afternoon light faded and the distant hills of Hampstead turned a purplish brown, Percy would be overcome by a sense of sadness. He would wish that he could go to Jenny, there and then, see her pale face, feel her eyes on him, just be in her presence. Yet still a week, perhaps two or three would go by before she would see him.
They always met somewhere in central London. Once, when he had suggested they could go for a walk on Hampstead Heath, she shook her head firmly and told him: “No. That’s ever such a long way to come, just for a walk.” And he had understood: it was too much of an invasion of her territory, implied too much commitment. They had always met in the safe and neutral zone after that.
It was hard to say exactly when he had detected a change. Perhaps it was the moment in Hyde Park when, for the first time, she had linked her arm in his. Their meetings had always been by day: a walk, a visit to the Tower, a visit to a tea shop, but as summer began he had determined to attempt something more daring: he would take her out one evening. He hardly knew what to do until Herbert had come to his aid.
“The Palladium, Percy,” he declared. “It’s all the rage.”
What a night that had been! The huge new theatre, which had only just opened in Piccadilly Circus, was offering the biggest and most splendid music-hall entertainment in London. He had never seen Jenny so animated. She had even joined in when the audience sang along with some of the musical numbers. Flushed and happy, she had let him escort her back to Hampstead in a cab afterwards.
At the gates of the tall gabled house, she had let him kiss her on the cheek. Then he had walked all the way back through the warm night to Victoria Station