‘Dolphin?’ the clerk repeated. ‘Dolphin. Well, yerse. We hold the keys. Were you wanting to view?’
‘If I might, I was,’ Peregrine Jay mumbled, wondering why such conversations should always be conducted in the past tense. ‘I mean,’ he added boldly, ‘I did and I still do. I want to view, if you please.’
The clerk made a little face that might have been a sneer or an occupational tic. He glanced at Peregrine, who supposed his appearance was not glossy enough to make him a likely prospect.
‘It is for sale, I believe?’ Peregrine said.
‘Oh, it’s for sale, all right.’ The clerk agreed contemptuously. He re-examined some document that he had on his desk.
‘May I view?’
‘Now?’
‘If it’s possible.’
‘Well – I don’t know, really, if we’ve anybody free at the moment,’ said the clerk and frowned at the rain streaming dirtily down the windows of his office.
Peregrine said, ‘Look. The Dolphin is an old theatre. I am a man of the theatre. Here is my card. If you care to telephone my agents or the management of my current production at The Unicorn they will tell you that I am honest, sober and industrious, a bloody good director and playwright and possessed of whatever further attributes may move you to lend me the keys of The Dolphin for an hour. I would like,’ he said, ‘to view it.’
The clerk’s face became inscrutable. ‘Oh, quite,’ he muttered and edged Peregrine’s card across his desk, looking sideways at it as if it might scuttle. He retired within himself and seemed to arrive at a guarded conclusion.
‘Yerse. Well, OK, Mr er. It’s not usually done but we try to oblige.’ He turned to a dirty-white board where keys hung like black tufts on a piece of disreputable ermine.
‘Dolphin,’ said the clerk, ‘Aeo, yerse. Here we are.’ He unhooked a bunch of keys and pushed them across the desk. ‘You may find them a bit hard to turn,’ he said. ‘We don’t keep on oiling the locks. There aren’t all that many inquiries.’ He made what seemed to be a kind of joke. ‘It’s quite a time since the blitz,’ he said.
‘Quarter of a century,’ said Peregrine, taking the keys.
‘That’s right. What a spectacle! I was a kid. Know your way I suppose, Mr – er – Jay?’
‘Thank you, yes.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said the clerk suddenly plumping for deference, but establishing at the same time his utter disbelief in Peregrine as a client. ‘Terrible weather. You will return the keys?’
‘Indubitably,’ said Peregrine, aping, he knew not why, Mr Robertson Hare.
He had got as far as the door when the clerk said: ‘Oh, be-the-way, Mr – er – Jay. You will watch how you go. Underfoot. On stage particularly. There was considerable damage.’
‘Thank you. I’ll be careful.’
‘The hole was covered over but that was some time ago. Like a well,’ the clerk added, worrying his first finger. ‘Something of the sort. Just watch it.’
‘I will.’
‘I – er – I don’t answer for what you’ll find,’ the clerk said. ‘Tramps get in, you know. They will do it. One died a year or so back.’
‘Oh.’
‘Not that it’s likely to happen twice.’
‘I hope not.’
‘Well, we couldn’t help it,’ the clerk said crossly. ‘I don’t know how they effect an entrance, really. Broken window or something. You can’t be expected to attend to everything.’
‘No,’ Peregrine agreed and let himself out.
Rain drove up Wharfingers Lane in a slanting wall. It shot off the pavement, pattering against doors and windows and hit Peregrine’s umbrella so hard that he thought it would split. He lowered it in front of him and below its scalloped and beaded margin saw, as if at rise of curtain in a cinema, the Thames, rain-pocked and choppy on its ebb-tide.
There were not a great many people about. Vans passed him grinding uphill in low gear. The buildings were ambiguous: warehouses? Wharfingers offices? Farther down he saw the blue lamp of a River Police Station. He passed a doorway with a neat legend: ‘Port of London Authority’ and another with old-fashioned lettering ‘Camperdown and Carboys Rivercraft Company. Demurrage. Wharfage. Inquiries.’
The lane turned sharply to the left; it now ran parallel with the river. He lifted his umbrella. Up it went, like a curtain, on The Dolphin. At that moment, abruptly, there was no more rain.
There was even sunshine. It washed thinly across the stagehouse of The Dolphin and picked it out for Peregrine’s avid attention. There it stood: high, square and unbecoming, the object of his greed and deep desire. Intervening buildings hid the rest of the theatre except for the wrought-iron ornament at the top of a tower. He hurried on until, on his left, he came to a pub called The Wharfinger’s Friend and then the bomb site and then, fully displayed, the wounded Dolphin itself.
On a fine day, Peregrine thought, a hundred years ago, watermen and bargees, ship’s chandlers, business gents, deep-water sailors from foreign parts and riverside riffraff looked up and saw The Dolphin. They saw its flag snapping and admired its caryatids touched up on the ringlets and nipples with tasteful gilt. Mr Adolphus Ruby, your very own Mr Ruby, stood here in Wharfingers Lane with his thumbs in his armholes, his cigar at one angle and his hat at the other and feasted his pop eyes on his very own palace of refined and original entertainment. ‘Oh, Oh!’ thought Peregrine, ‘and here I stand but not, alas, in Mr Ruby’s lacquered high-lows. And the caryatids have the emptiest look in their blank eyes for me.’
They were still there, though, two on each side of the portico. They finished at their waists, petering out with grimy discretion in pastry-cook’s scrolls. They supported with their sooty heads and arms a lovely wrought-iron balcony and although there were occasional gaps in their plaster foliations they were still in pretty good trim. Peregrine’s doting fancy cleaned the soot from upper surfaces. It restored, too, the elegant sign: supported above the portico by two prancing cetaceous mammals, and regilded its lettering: ‘The Dolphin Theatre’.
For a minute or two he looked at it from the far side of the lane. The sun shone brightly now. River, shipping and wet roofs reflected it and the cobblestones in front of the theatre began to send up a thin vapour. A sweep of seagulls broke into atmospheric background noises and a barge honked.
Peregrine crossed the wet little street and entered the portico.
It was stuck over with old bills including the agents’ notice which had evidently been there for a very long time and was torn and discoloured. ‘This Valuable Commercial Site’, it said.
‘In that case,’ Peregrine wondered, ‘why hasn’t it been sold? Why had no forward-looking commercial enterprise snapped up the Valuable Site and sent the Dolphin Theatre crashing about