Essex Poison. Ian Sansom

1

       LONDON, UNDERGROUND

      BERRAK THE TURK was busy smoking narghile and reading the newspaper while simultaneously dispensing hot sweet mint tea from the tarnished silver urn perched on the edge of the counter. He was dressed as always in a wrinkled white shirt and was seated on the long, low lumpy leather sofa that served as his office and command centre, old newspapers and his dictionary piled beside him, an enamel bowl of sugar cubes and bright green mint leaves close to hand. The wall behind him was exposed brick, painted a mottled pale blue, presumably intended to resemble a clear summer day. But the wall oozed and trickled silently with damp, making it look rather more like a mourning sky in autumn. The dusty bookcase beside the desk was piled high with worn and ragged towels and beneath the hiss and glare of the crooked gas chandelier hung a stained board marked with prices: the prices never changed and bore no resemblance to what you paid. The gramophone was playing a scratchy ’78 of classical classics, the same record that was always playing, ever since I had been coming; there was no other record. Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor; even I knew that the second movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 was about to follow. I wondered if Berrak ever grew tired of it. He showed no signs of doing so.

      ‘Selam! Selam! Mr Sefton, you are back. You have returned! Nasilisiniz? We haven’t seen you for so long.’

      I had been away with Morley and Miriam in Westmorland, where things, it must be admitted, had not gone entirely to plan. For every good memory from those years there is always something else, something that can’t be avoided or denied: some death or disaster, some terrible discovery or disappointment. I’d learned in Spain that dread and despair are constant companions to adventure and during my time with Morley, for all its good, it often felt as though I were somehow being buried alive in yet more bad memories and that there was no escape. I had to do everything and anything to help me breathe.

      ‘Mr Sefton!’ continued Berrak. ‘It is very good to see you. Very very good.’ He shook me warmly by the hand. At least Berrak never changed. ‘My uncle was asking about you.’ He offered me tea. ‘Smoke?’ I declined both the tea and the smoke. ‘Uncle will be pleased.’

      Berrak’s uncle was not his actual uncle. He may well have had a dozen actual uncles back home in Turkey but his English uncle was a Mr Klein, the owner of the Russian Turkish Baths and Berrak’s employer. I had met Klein on a number of occasions. We’d got on well. He was an educated man – neither Russian nor Turkish nor indeed English but from Poland, via Hackney – tiny, barely feet five tall, and fascinated by literature and by art, and with almost as many opinions as he had business interests. Klein made and sold his own rouges and fragrances (‘Klein’s Perspiration-Proof Make-Up’), he made and sold wigs (formed of real human hair), he ran a chain of haberdashers and hairdressers (patronised by the stars of British cinema), he rented properties and owned part shares in cinemas (including the beautiful old Capitol cinema in Winchmore Hill), he sold furs and jewellery, and he had the baths. He was a businessman in the very broadest sense. When I had first returned from Spain he had been kind enough to offer me work in the import and export branch of one of the businesses based down at St Katharine Docks, but I had been unable to take him up on the offer – not being in a fit state at the time to do anything but patronise his baths and go drinking. Sometimes I wondered what my life might have become if I had thrown in my lot with Mr Klein rather than with Morley. Things might have worked out better – or maybe not. Different, certainly.

      ‘It is very delighted to see you, Mr Sefton,’ said Berrak. He was paid to make people feel welcome, of course, but, nonetheless, he was good at his job. ‘We are all very glad to see you! I will tell Mr Klein you were here. Immediately, hereupon and in a jiffy.’

      I had known Berrak for two or three years. I knew nothing about him except that he was a keen student of the English language and was always eager to try out the new words that he learned from his dictionary and from the newspapers.

      ‘Some people came here asking for you.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘Today. Yesterday. The foretimes.’

      ‘Did they say who they were?’

      ‘They said they were your friends.’

      ‘I see. What did they look like?’

      Berrak shrugged his shoulders. The narghile didn’t only contain tobacco.

      ‘Was it a man and a woman?’

      Berrak shrugged again. He could be intolerably vague, as well as unconditionally welcoming; perhaps the two things were related. He was in many ways the perfect doorman and receptionist, though one wouldn’t want to have relied on him as a witness. I paid my money and he handed me a greasy metal token and a threadbare towel that had perhaps once been royal blue but which was now a very definite shade of grey.

      I went to Klein’s Russian Turkish Baths not to get clean – there were plenty of places in London you could go to get clean. (Probably the best baths in those days were on Grange Road in Bermondsey, a palace in marble and stone, but they were always crowded with women doing their washing and children in the swimming baths.) I went to Klein’s, and to the old Ironmonger Row Baths, and one or two other places in Soho that offered other services, for the same reason in those years that I went to bars and to pubs, and to bottle parties: to escape.

      The effect of entering Klein’s was profound and instantaneous. You walked down the corridor away from the reception and into a world that was warmer, hazier and altogether more pleasant than that which you left behind – the effect of heat and damp, of low lights and lowered voices. A few Moorish-style lanterns on the wall lit the way to the changing room.

      I undressed and showered: you always showered before bathing. The rusty spigots that served as showerheads spat out a trickle of warm water that ran into a gutter that circled the room like a castle moat, and which was always almost-but-not-quite full to overflowing with a foaming tide of suds. Berrak probably needed to spend less time smoking narghile and more time slopping out, but then again this was all a part of the charm of the place. Klein’s was neither a true Turkish hamam nor a Russian banya: it was a step down and away from the city into the secret and endless comforts of the River Lethe and the waters of forgetfulness. Some people said that the water was diverted from the River Fleet itself. It was London, underground.

      Leaving the changing room, I walked down more slippery stone steps and through and along another corridor, inhaling the rich, thick damp vapour as I went. Pipes overhead hummed and belched and rattled with steam. It was as though the building were alive, an actual being, welcoming you and embracing you. I felt my shoulders relaxing and my chest expanding with every breath. I had spent the evening gambling and drinking – gin, cheap white wine, and whatever else I could get hold of. I was feeling pretty tight.

      The corridor led to a tiny pool not much larger than a water tank, which you climbed up and into via stepladders. There was nothing down here – ten, twenty feet beneath High Holborn – but darkness and the sound of running water. Set around the pool was a series of steam rooms of varying heat, set aside for various activities. Mixed bathing was permitted at Klein’s, but I never once saw a woman there. It was a place for men to be men – and to forget to be men.

      I had paid Berrak for the masseur, a tough little Lascar who everyone called Darjeeling, though of course that can’t possibly have been his name. I’m rather ashamed now to admit that I never bothered to ask him what he was really called. He had permanent quarters established in one of the cooler steam rooms. I knocked, stepped in and handed him my token. As was his custom he immediately set to work without a single word.

      The Darjeeling Room, as everyone called it, always smelled the same: of sweat, cheese and tobacco. It was a place where time stood still and where Darjeeling practised the ancient arts that he may have learned in India, or in the navy, or perhaps indeed from a book like Morley’s Scientific Massage: Principles and Techniques (1922), in which Morley recommends the vigorous application of talcum, vaseline