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couldn’t be left behind. We started off with myself at the reins of the carriage and he ahead on horseback, but for no good reason he changed his mind and took back the horse and climbed up with me: there wasn’t room inside.
    ‘Blazes,’ he said, once we were on our way. ‘It’s infuriating the things one has to remember.’
    ‘It is indeed,’ I replied crisply, and bent my head against the wind.
    I didn’t wholeheartedly despise George Hardy, even though I considered him a hypocrite. He’d done me no harm, far from it, and I acknowledged his good qualities, including not being close-fisted. I dare say he could afford it, but often he treated broken bones and abscesses and the like, knowing full well his patients didn’t have a button to their names. Hadn’t he mended my mouth, damaged from my fire-eating days!
    At the beginning, when chance had hurled us together, he’d offered me full-time employment, of a menial sort, in his household - blacking boots, seeing to the horses, running errands - but I told him straight I wasn’t cut out to act the servant, not having the temperament to take orders. Some people find it comfortable to go through life on their knees, and good luck to them, but I prefer to keep my spine in the position nature intended. Besides, I already had my own means of keeping body and soul together, and after he’d learned me the tricks of the camera I earned a respectable living from the taking of shilling portraits.
    I should have been grateful, but I wasn’t, not entirely. What riled me was his lack of ease in my company, his keeping me at a distance, which couldn’t be put down to differences of birth or education, for in his dealings with inferiors at the hospital his manner contained not the slightest degree of condescension or stiffness. With me, he held off. On the occasions when he addressed me directly I grew to fancy even his voice came out muffled, as though he spoke from within a nailed-up box. Since our first meeting he’d never once referred to that rainy afternoon when we’d carried a dead man across a field, but the recollection of it stood between us all the same, and when he looked at me I often thought he saw his father’s hat jammed upon my head.
    We took the Regent Road that ran beside the docks, the wind carrying the sickly sweet odour of damp grain, the air raucous with the screech of foraging gulls. We were forced to go at no more than a walk through the crush of vehicles juddering in either direction. Near the Brunswick Tavern a shipment of cattle, just then unloaded from Ireland and headed for the abattoir, came slithering and jostling across our path. George roared out, ‘Whoa,’ the command swooping out like a war-whoop, though it was me that gripped the reins. We were delayed for a quarter of an hour or more. He grew tetchy, fearful of missing his appointment with the ape, and vowed he’d never forgive William Rimmer if he commenced the business without him.
    ‘What part am I to play?’ I enquired.
    ‘It will be your job to hold the animal down,’ he answered.
    I digested this with some unease. It was one thing to throw a tiger rug over a chair, quite another to subdue a wild beast.
    ‘And it’s then that you’ll cut out its eyes?’
    ‘Not out,’ he cried. ‘We shall merely remove its cataracts.’
    I hadn’t a notion of what these might be, and couldn’t ask, for now he was on his feet, fairly jigging with impatience, rocking the two-wheeler alarmingly, kicking out at the nearest cow and shouting at the drover to make haste. ‘ ‘Self-control is a great asset,’ I observed, at which he shot me a look of fury, and sat down.
    At Bank Hall, the dockyards coming to an end and the tide well out, we drove on to the shore, rolling beside the ink black waves, the sand hard as oak after the night frost. At a spanking pace we passed Miller’s Castle, now empty, its forecourt silted up with mud, its bathing cubicles toppling into the mud