The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

ragged, some Sunday-best, which always materializes from nowhere if there is ever the chance that a lady of respectable middle years may fall, shrieking, into a river. The two of them watched, attentively, and would not for the world have admitted that their motives were no more noble than those of the boys. The spectacle came to a disappointing end, safely, and the puerile onlookers almost sighed, waiting for the next entertainment the river’s ordinary traffic might afford them.

      ‘I would give ten pounds,’ Burnes said after a while, ‘to know the precise contents of every bale, every chest, every warehouse we can see.’ She had not expected him to say anything romantic, and he had not; he had said something better, something interesting. ‘To come down here – I feel rather like a novelist must in a crowded room in an inn. To feel that if all the unspeaking secrets contained in it were opened up – then, I should be master of the world, and know everything.’

      ‘What would you discover?’

      Burnes picked up a stone and sent it skimming into the river.

      ‘Nothing, perhaps,’ he said. ‘You could ask people about their passions. That is the way to discover something. No – they would only lie to you.’

      ‘Sometimes,’ Bella said. ‘Would we discover a great deal by your exercise? Even if we did go down to the wharf and pay the boatman five shillings to allow us to inspect his load, what do you suppose we should find? A boatload of cotton, or coal, or tea, I expect; nothing more interesting or romantic than that.’

      ‘Bella, you disappoint me,’ Burnes said, rubbing his hands together, although it was not cold in the slightest degree. Bella turned and stared at her companion, as if he had gone mad. ‘Not interesting? Not romantic? The docks of London?’

      ‘Romantic?’ Bella said. ‘Come now, Burnes, be less paradoxical with me. I am too dull for this.’

      ‘No paradox whatever,’ Burnes said. ‘Merely think – cotton, and coal, and tea – commonplace dull things. Think where they have come from, Bella; think of the journey they have undertaken, through what wastes and deserts, think what hands they have passed through, what fortunes, what hopes rest on these ordinary things. There are men thousands of miles beyond India, whose inner eyes are bent, this very moment, on that exact load of rice, there—’

      ‘You exaggerate, sir.’

      ‘Not a whit. Men considering whether, now, their little fortune has reached England safely or is at this moment lying at the bottom of the sea; men wondering whether some shift in weather will double the value of what they sent us, so many months ago, when it comes to sale, or whether it will realize half the poor farmer’s expectations. Riches or poverty, competing furiously in a man’s mind; a family made or destroyed, there in that bale. Look on that, Bella. Look in front of you. The whole world is here, this afternoon, now. In those cases, being thrown down, coffee and silks and spices, wool and diamonds, all docketed and ticked, all as if it were the most ordinary thing imaginable that the great world should pass through London, like a great haystack passing through the eye of a single needle. Import and export; sending England out to the world, taking the world into England. Cotton, silk, spice, coffee, gold, silver. The world, Bella, the world. Do you not feel it, Bella? Do you not see that I am showing you what I can, showing you the world? You could never find out what people want by going into a room and asking them. But by God, if you could stop this day now, at this moment, and spend as long as you liked examining every bale, every load, every sack of goods you can see, finding out what everything was worth, who sent it, who is about to buy it, by God, you would begin to understand the world. You would begin to understand what the world dreams of.’

      9.

      The river continued its placid brown life, unmoved by Burnes’s enthusiasm. As Burnes had talked, they had started to walk again, and they now found themselves in the shadow of the great bridge. A boatman clung on to the rope hanging on the nearest pier, the boat under his lurching feet being pushed away by the current. It swung from one side of the great pier to the other. With his left hand, he nonchalantly ate a bit of bread and an onion. The river was low, its stench so strong and heavy that it could be tasted in the mouth. A flock of coal-lighters was secured for the next few hours in the treacle-rich ooze of the river’s mud, a stuff almost valuable in itself. On the far bank, boys, almost naked, were plunging into this thick mass of mud, occasionally surfacing with cries to show that some small treasure, some penny had been found. Here surfaced a boy, black and dripping, his hand upstretched with a treasure, and trying to hail a little green tug with his shrieking gull-cry. The traffic of the river continued its furious pace uninterrupted, in the middle stream, like water-insects, handling each other out of the path with busy prodding prongs, hooks, ropes, businesslike and abrupt, not pausing for pleasantry, or apology; the purposeful dancing of a rude public ball. Long and intricate levels of wooden stairs and causeways, eroded and slippery smooth, clung to the river’s edge, and each boat, loading, unloading, mooring for a few short hours, seemed like an efficient drab bird which had alighted on one branch rather than another for no particular reason. In a moment it would set off again in a new direction, impelled by nothing more than its own furious energy. As each boat sat there, it seemed as if it cost it more energy to stay still than to move.

      Bella said nothing. To her, it had always seemed the river, brown-black, crowded, noisy and stinking; it had never seemed to matter greatly where her tea came from, what produced the stuff for her linen. She could not suppose that the originators of the stuff worked explicitly to supply her with tribute, like the worshippers of a pagan god. Money and trade; filth and lucre. And yet she did feel it, she did; she felt that here, with Burnes, she was being shown a world; whether it was the great world Burnes descanted on, or the great opening mind of a man she suddenly, incomprehensibly, loved and would give herself to, she did not know.

      ‘It frightens you, the world?’ Burnes said suddenly. His eyes were fixed on Bella’s face; they were dark and swarming with appraisal. They wavered in their orbs as if searching for some secret that Bella’s face held.

      ‘Perhaps it does,’ Bella said carefully. ‘Sometimes I don’t understand what – quite what the greater part of it has to do with me. You will despise me for that.’

      ‘Never,’ Burnes said, his eyes fiery, fixed on hers, and in one unspoken agreement, they turned, and began to pick their way through London, to return to the place they came from.

      The house, still, was empty as they entered, and in the dark hall, Burnes turned to her. She looked with bewilderment upon his face, but he was not preparing to leave her: on the contrary, he was keeping her, and in his expression was a new certainty, as if he knew all at once where to go and what to do. Still with her hand in his, she, all bewildered, submitted to be led forward a pace or two. He hesitated for a moment: it appeared that now he had forgotten what opportunity he had perceived in the course of the journey from the river to this sad empty house; forgotten why he was standing here, why he had taken Bella’s hand. But it was, after all, easier than that. She looked at him. His head was cocked like a foxhound’s. He was listening for the sound of any other person in the house.

      ‘Very well, then, Burnes,’ she said, and she had spoken her decision, her right hand in his. What they had understood with the burden of those so few days bearing down upon them, neither would express: she felt that. He led her, then, saying nothing, and she submitted to be led; and together, in the empty house, they walked upstairs.

       FIVE

      1.

      ASTRANGER WAS THERE, out there, somewhere, somewhere in the haphazard piled-up overlapping streets of Kabul. No one had planned this city, and its many streets were like hundreds of thousands of individual routes. As if a pond was made of the ways that fish find through it. Down there, somewhere in the carpet-mass of pattern and direction and half-intended result, a European stranger had arrived, in an inadequate and fascinating disguise, and the town, quietly, was talking and talking and talking about the new arrival until