Sunday at the Cross Bones

‘What? Oh, I see. No no no.’ Benny was laughing now, a bit pissed. ‘You silly sod, no, I don’t mean that. We first met playing actual French horns together in the Vintage Musick Ensemble in Whitechapel. You knew that.’ He chuckled, man to man. ‘No, believe me, we don’t have to make a special evening of the old how’s your father. Christ, we’ve only been married six months. She’s still keen as mustard, she is.’

‘Benny,’ I said, waving a hand, ‘spare me the details, old son.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘she’s always on for a touch. Sometimes, in the mornings, it’s all I can do to pull her off the old –’

Nice chap, Benny, but I really didn’t want to have to visualise his larks in the morning. Seeking a distraction, I looked around the pub.

The vicar was still in the snug, his pint of squash dangerously low. He wasn’t alone any longer. There was a boy beside him, about ten, with a dozen evening papers under his arm. He was a last-edition runner, the kind employed for tuppence ha’penny an hour to take the final round of the Standard to pubs and railway stations around town when the street vendors have packed up for the night and gone home to their lady wives. I assumed the kid was trying to flog the news to the old geezers, but there was something about his pinched demeanour which made me think he was waiting for something more.

I know these runners. They’re little more than urchins and strays, most of them, trying to make a few bob before heading home to their alky dads and their vicious mothers and their yowling siblings wandering around eating dripping sandwiches at nine o’clock at night. They should be in bed, after a day when they should be in school, but aren’t because they’re hanging around Smithfield Market, hosing down the stalls for a tanner or pinching offcuts of scraggy veal for their supper. Those that have homes, I mean.

I don’t have a social conscience, most of the time. I just report on things. But sometimes I get a bit hacked off about kids that age selling newsprint, with their dirty little faces and their weirdly deep voices, like they’ve been smoking Players since they were two.

Benny was still on about married bliss. He felt I should know that his wife sometimes cooks him lamb chops standing in the kitchen wearing an apron and nothing else. Now I’ve met Clare, just once. A nice girl and a whizz on the French horn, no doubt, but she wouldn’t start a riot at the peepshow. I tried to shake the vision of her aproned rear out of my head.

‘We should go out in a four some time,’ I said, not really meaning it. ‘You and Clare, me and Sal. One Friday, we could meet in town and have a bit of a carouse.’

‘Ooh. I see the rector’s making friends.’

I looked. The clergyman and the boy had been joined by an older man, a churchy greybeard in a black suit, side whiskers and droopy eyebags. Man of the cloth or manager of a chapel of rest, there was a whiff of the mortality business about him. The kid stood between them, as awkward as a bullock in a fishmonger’s.

‘What they up to, Benny, you reckon?’

‘Couldn’t say, old son. The kid’s flogging newspapers, but our friend hasn’t bought one. The old cove looks like a headmaster, so maybe the kid’s been bunking off school and the rector’s rounded him up. Either that or he’s selling him into white slavery.’

‘Be serious, Ben, this is interesting.’

‘Go and find out if you’re so keen. Go on. I’ll still be here. I got my paper.’ He tapped my arm. ‘But don’t get bogged down. Half an hour of bollocks about the Undeserving Poor and Homeless, you’ll wish you never started.’

So I went to the bar again, but this time I passed by the snug and hovered until the men stopped their chat and turned to me.

‘Can I help you?’ said the vicar.

‘I’ve had a bit of a windfall,’ I said, using an ancient ploy, ‘and I’m standing everyone in the pub a drink. Would you gentlemen care for a tipple on me?’

They looked at each other.

‘No thank you,’ said the whiskered loon, ‘I don’t care to be bought drinks by strangers.’

Well, excuse me, I thought. I looked at the kid, who just stood there, the fingers of his right hand the colour of beetroot because of the weight of the newspapers he carried. His head was bowed, poor chap, because it would never have occurred to him that he might be included in a round.

‘Yourself, sir?’ I nearly called him ‘Reverend’.

‘Come now, Mr Forsyth,’ the vicar said, turning to his surly chum, ‘surely every impulse of philanthropy should be encouraged, no matter how random its provenance.’ He talked like a Victorian gent, though he couldn’t have been all that old, and he smiled at me, his piercing eyes suddenly fixing on mine. ‘Thank you, my friend. I will take another orange cordial with a slice of lemon and plenty of water.’ He was so fastidious in his order – like a man demanding Angostura bitters in his gin Martini.

I came back with the drinks into an awkward silence.

‘Can I just ask you a question or two?’ I asked him.

‘My time is limited,’ he said. ‘I have many affairs to transact. What would you like to know?’

‘I won’t pretend with you, Vicar –’ I began.

‘– Rector, if you don’t mind.’

‘Rector. I’m a reporter on the Evening Standard. I’ve been hearing about your work among the less fortunate members of society. I wondered if maybe –’

‘Gerald.’ He cut across me, addressing the spotty youth with the newspapers. ‘Do not stand there so passive and round-shouldered like some professional mute. Mr Forsyth is your new benefactor. He will be your friend and employer. He can furnish you with a livelihood which will, with the Lord’s help, keep your family solvent and your poor mother able to furnish your table with meat and greens until Christmas. And if – mind me now – if you prove to be a good and biddable boy, and do as you are told, and fetch messages to and from the turf accountants, your work will stretch well into the new year.’

Gerald stood blinking pathetically, as if longing to get away. Who could blame him? He was a child still, as uninterested in the prospect of work as a pit pony being apprised of a favourable pension scheme.

‘I gotta –’ he ventured.

‘I want you now,’ said the rector, turning his remarkable eyes upon the raggedy kid’s, ‘to shake Mr Forsyth’s hand and promise to come to his office on Monday in your best jacket and shorts, and conduct yourself like the admirable young man I take you to be.’ He smiled at the spotty boy. ‘Remember St John’s Gospel. “He that followeth me shall not walk in darkness.” You have followed me this far. Mr Forsyth will guide your steps henceforth.’

The boy nodded. The rector touched the boy’s pustular cheek softly, like a duchess fingering an ermine tippet.

‘I gotta go,’ said the boy unhappily. ‘Gotta be in the King’s Arms.’ And he was gone.

Mr Forsyth – revealed, for all his grave demeanour, to be only a common bookie – swallowed some beer and, avoiding my gaze, addressed the clergyman.

‘I’ll do my best, of course, Harold. But I cannot …’ He sighed. ‘I cannot guarantee he won’t disappear out the door on day three like the last delinquents you sent me.’ He swigged more pale ale. ‘You cannot keep passing these runaways on to me, to transform into citizens. I am a businessman –’

‘A man of honour,’ said the rector, ‘a man of moral rectitude, whose indulgent interventions in the lives of these unfortunates have, as I’ve said many times –’

‘Harold, there is no need for this –’

‘Let me finish. Whose kindly impulses –’

‘Harold, really –’

‘– not only do you credit in the public arena, but rack up untold credits in the balance sheet of Heaven. I speak to you in the language of the businessman, but my admiration is that of a minister of a higher power.’

‘Ahem,’ I said. I’d been standing witnessing these interchanges like a gooseberry.

‘My dear fellow,’ said the rector, ‘I’d forgotten you were there. Forgive me. There were urgent matters at hand.’

‘You mean finding news runners jobs as bookies’ runners?’ I said, perhaps unkindly.

He regarded me coldly. ‘You evidently know nothing of my work. Yet you said you were acquainted with it. Explain yourself.’

‘I’m a news reporter on the Standard. I’m doing an article about poverty in London, how much it’s worsened in the last couple of years, who’s doing anything about it, private individuals, I mean. I want to ask about your experiences.’

He seemed hesitant.

‘Sorry about just now,’ I went on. ‘I got a bit of a short fuse where these newspaper kids are concerned. I hope you didn’t –’

‘Have you indeed? In that case, my dear fellow, we shall get on very well.’