The Memory of Blood(66)

‘Take no notice of me. I shall keep my mouth zipped until I have further evidence. Let’s talk to Mr Granville. Pull in here.’

‘It’s a double-red zone, Arthur.’

‘You really have to stop worrying about these minor legal details. Don’t you get it? We’re old, we can do whatever we like. Come along. We’re late.’

Pollock’s Toy Museum was named after Benjamin Pollock, the last of the Victorian toy theatre printers. When it moved from the teeming streets of Covent Garden in 1969, it was relocated in an old corner house in a shaded backstreet behind Tottenham Court Road.

The museum on the corner of Whitfield Street was built over a working shop that specialised in Victorian puppets and theatres. Bryant peered in at the nicotine-coloured window display, which had not changed in decades. Bright red and yellow proscenium arches, trimmed from cardboard, reflected a world long vanished. In the narrow winding staircases and corridors above the shop, glass-eyed dolls and balding teddy bears stared out from corners. The existence of such a place in the modern world was a testament to the determination of its owners, who were resolved to keep the gateway of childish imagination open.

Nimrod Granville was one of the few men working in London who made Arthur Bryant appear healthful. Tussocks of snowy hair were clumped about the freckled, corrugated flesh of his pate, and a pair of ridiculous half-moon glasses were perched upon his spectacularly hooked hooter, lending him the appearance of Mr Punch himself. These days he remained seated on a high wooden stool behind the counter, and the shop’s dimly lit interior played havoc with his ability to read the boxes that contained the shop’s toy theatres, but Dudley Salterton had recommended him to Bryant as the capital’s last working expert on Victorian theatrical toys. Granville asserted that his longevity was due to a regular intake of Guinness and a sixty-a-day cigarette habit that had begun when he was twelve years old. Consequently his breathing sounded like a gale blowing through a fence and he was required to stop every thirty seconds to get his wind back.

‘I hear you’ve found the Madame Blavatsky,’ he said. ‘Dudley called me, very excited. We thought she had been lost in the Blitz.’

‘I didn’t realise she had a reputation,’ Bryant replied. ‘She still works.’

‘Those things were precision-engineered to last, and the oil doesn’t dry out in them because the cogs are sealed within vacuum glass. She’s worth a bob or two.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t sell her.’

‘Good man. She’s a creepy old thing, isn’t she? Of course, I’ve only seen pictures. I’d love to come and try her out. I’ve always been fascinated by automata, ever since I heard about the Turk.’

‘What’s the Turk?’ May asked.

‘It was a mechanical chess player constructed in 1770 to impress the Empress Maria Theresa, a turbaned man on a wooden box filled with brass machinery. The Turk could beat human opponents at chess, and also performed something called the Knight’s Tour, which was a puzzle requiring the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard just once. The Turk was a sham, of course, but a rather beautiful one. The machinery appeared to go all the way to the back of the cabinet but this was optical trickery. The last third of the cabinet housed a tiny man who was a chess master. But the illusion was a complex one involving deceptive sounds, magnets and levers that worked brilliantly. It eventually ended up in America and was destroyed in a fire. There have been reconstructions, but the Turk was the first and best of the automata. The French made brothel automata in the late nineteenth century that simulated lovemaking. And these days I hear the Japanese have developed life-sized robotic dolls that respond to the human voice, powered by tiny microchips.’

‘Have you ever heard of a Mr Punch puppet that could operate in this manner?’ asked Bryant.

‘You’d think he would be an obvious choice, wouldn’t you? But no, there’s not been one to my knowledge. Punch is out of favour these days. Not politically correct. But then, he was never intended to be. Most people don’t really get what he was about.’

‘What do you think he was about?’

‘Anarchy,’ answered Granville. ‘Chaos, pure and simple. It is a mad world, and the only way to survive in it is by behaving more madly than anyone else. Punch exists beyond good and evil, right and wrong. I suppose you could say he’s a god. He remakes the universe in his own image.’

‘You must meet people who love this sort of thing,’ said Bryant. ‘Collectors, academics. You wouldn’t happen to have a list of them, would you?’