I walked back to my lodgings, something I often did when I needed to think. It was more than six miles, from the City to Chelsea, and it took me well over an hour even though I walked at a fast pace all the way. The sight of the black-painted front door gave me none of the pleasure that the prospect of home should give a man. It was all that separated me from the boiled cabbage and wax polish, the smells that gather in an over-occupied house whose windows have not been opened for a quarter century. It was a dingy house, in a dingy street, in a dingy part of town. Nearly every second house, I believed, was occupied by widows who let out rooms to people like me. Opposite was one that functioned as a school for young ladies, turning them into operators of the typewriter, so they could push men out of their jobs as copyists and clerks. A few houses were owned by shopkeepers or clerks desperately clinging to respectability by their fingertips. All of human life, from a particular stratum of society, could be found in Paradise Walk, behind the grubby windows and cracking stucco. Paradise Walk! Never was a street more badly misnamed. I can only assume that the speculative builder who threw up the ill-built, utterly anonymous houses some half-century previously had possessed a strange sense of humour.
Even worse was that my window, second floor at the back, looked over the grand gardens and opulence of bohemian London. Successful artists had congregated in Tite Street, parallel to my own, but lived in a very different fashion. One garden in particular I could see, and used to gaze at the two children – a boy and a girl, dressed in white as they played in the sunshine – the lovely woman who was their mother, the portly father who was a member of the Academy. And dream of such an idyllic existence, so unlike my own childhood, which had contained no sunlight at all.
Not all journalists are editors, not all artists are members of the Academy. John Praxiteles Brock, my fellow lodger, was not then a success; his torment at having to look out every morning at the proof of unattainable glory in the next street was balanced by his desire to rub shoulders with the famous, who might assist him in his career. He would come home occasionally bubbling with excitement and pride: 'I said good morning to Sargent this morning!' or 'Henry MacAlpine was buying a pint of milk in front of me today!' Alas, it was rare that either said good morning in return. Perhaps his desperation frightened them; perhaps the fact that his father was a sculptor (hence his unfortunate middle name) of retrograde opinions and unpleasant temper put them off; perhaps they felt that youth has to fight on its own. Now he is more successful, Brock gives little encouragement to others, either.
I awoke the next morning with a formidable hunger, as I had eaten little, and walked much, the previous evening. So I dressed swiftly and went down to the eating room, where Mrs Morrison prepared breakfast for her boys every morning. She was the only reason I stayed in the house and I believe it was the same for the others who lodged with her. As a housekeeper she verged on the hopeless, as a cook she was very much worse. Her breakfasts tended towards the obscene, and she boiled her vegetables in the evening with such vigour that we were lucky if they were merely yellow when poured onto the plate in a pool of steaming water, there to mix with the grey, tough meat that she cooked in a fashion so personal that no one could ever really figure out how, exactly, she had reduced a once-living animal to such a sorry wreck. Philip Mulready, a man who wished to win fame through poetry (he later settled for a wealthy heiress instead) used on occasion to declaim verses in honour of the poor animal sacrificed on Mrs Morrison's altar. 'There thou liest, unhappy pig, so grey, so pale and wan . . .;' although, sensitive to our landlady's feelings, he made sure that she was in the kitchen when Calliope touched his forehead with inspiration.
She might well have missed the irony in any case. Mrs Morrison was a good woman, a widow doing her best to survive in a hard world, and if the food was vile and the mantelpiece thick with dust, she created a jolly, warm atmosphere. Not only that, she was prepared to mend our clothes, do our washing and leave us alone. All she required in return was a moderate rent and a little company now and again. A pound a week and some chat was little enough to pay.
