Anthony Quinn The Streets (epub)

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.Beneath his jacket he wore a waistcoat of flaming scarlet-and-green tartan.‘Morning, sirs,’ he said.‘And what may I do for you?’‘This young feller requires a coat,’ said Marchmont, still absorbed in his examination.The man took a cursory measurement of my chest with his grubby tailor’s measure.‘Well, we does all sorts, sir – dress coats, Ulster coats, great coats, frock coats, pea coats, bob-tailed coats, pilot coats, and overcoats of a h’aristocratic style, though there’s no great call for ’em nowadays,’ he added, with a faint note of regret.He fixed a narrow-eyed look on me.‘I fancy you might suit summin’ like this.’ and he pulled from the rack a grand black frock coat with wide peaked lapels.He held it for me to shrug on and gave a little brush to the shoulders.Marchmont at last deigned to cast his eye over the garment.‘It’s a tidy fit,’ he said, ‘and decent cloth, too.’‘Oh, it’s nice as nip, sir, better than what they does you in the slop trade – far better.’ And he gave another little stroke to the material, as if it were the coat of a favourite dog.I rather admired it myself, until I happened to notice on the revers of the left sleeve a curious brownish stain, about the size of a wax seal.I felt a sudden inward recoil.‘What’s this?’The clothes dealer peered at it.‘Looks like dried blood.P’raps a butcher once worn it.’ He appeared quite unconcerned by this possibility.I looked to Marchmont, who also took a neutral view of the stain.‘More likely a surgeon’s,’ he said, ‘given the cloth’s quality.’This last word roused the dealer to enthusiasm.‘Oh, I’m glad you sees the quality, sir.Not many customers is very perticler about quality – they just comes ’ere for a bargain.’But by now I was unbuttoning the coat – I couldn’t get the thing off my back quickly enough.Blood!? Marchmont, his eyebrows raised in surprise, stared at me.‘I can’t wear that.I’m sorry,’ I said, with enough conviction in my voice to forestall any argument.The dealer looked baffled by my rejection.Marchmont only said, ‘It seems you have a customer more perticler than most.’I turned to the man.‘You said that you had pilot coats.’ I did not know a pilot coat from a pilot fish, but I liked the sound of this raiment.The man went back to the racks and plucked out a double-breasted jacket with wooden buttons in dark blue serge, less fine than the frock coat, but free of incriminating stains.It was shortish in length, but the collar could be pulled up to protect your ears from the cold, and there were slash pockets at each side to warm the hands.I looked at myself in the brown-spotted glass of a cheval mirror, and thought the coat looked well.Marchmont’s reflection joined mine – he seemed somehow diminished in the glass.‘You have the look of someone about to run off to sea,’ he said archly.‘I had an uncle who was a sailor,’ I replied.‘I believe I met him once.’ And I knew that his ship had gone down with all hands somewhere on the way to Guatemala, in the 1860s.The man had sniffed a sale.‘In good condition, too.Worth twelve shillin’s of anyone’s money.’I nodded, thinking that reasonable, but Marchmont gave a theatrical sigh.‘I’m sure you can do better than that,’ he said.The man gave a defensive shrug.‘Twelve is about the card for a good thing like this, sir.You said y’self, you pays for quality.’‘Not quite what I said,’ replied Marchmont drily, and for the next minute or so the two of them haggled over what might be a fair price.The man insisted he could not go lower than ten, but Marchmont with casual tenacity knocked him down to eight.So I had my coat, and had spared myself a few bob into the bargain.Or so I thought then.For the rest of the morning Marchmont conducted me on a perambulation of Somers Town, which district, I learned, he had known intimately from his youth.He had once lived at Seymour Street, he said, in the days when the place still clung to its fading cloak of respectability.Before that, at the end of the last century, it had been home to a colony of ‘foreign artisans’, mostly from France, who sought refuge from the Reign of Terror [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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