Our theories about The Darter’s style of walking in a crouch completely changed when he took us onto that mussel boat. Rachel and I moved cautiously down the slippery ramp, while The Darter barely watched what he was doing, half turning to make sure Rachel did not miss her footing while simultaneously tossing his cigarette into the four-inch gap between the embankment and the lilting boat. Steps that felt hazardous to us were an easy dance floor for him, and that wary crouch was now replaced by casualness as he moved along the foot-wide gunwales covered in rain and grease. He later claimed he had been conceived during a twenty-four-hour storm on the river. His ancestors were generations of lightermen and thus he had a river body that showed an accent only on land. He knew every tideway between Twickenham and Lower Hope Point and could identify docks by their smell or the sound of loading cargo. His father had been “a freeman of the river,” he boasted; this in spite of the fact that he also spoke of him as a cruel man who’d forced him into the boxing profession in his teens.
The Darter also had a mouthful of whistles, for every barge, he told us, had its own signal. You learned it when starting work on a new boat. It was the only signal you were allowed to use over the water as a recognition or a warning, and each whistle was based on a bird call. He’d met river people, he said, who walking in a landlocked forest had suddenly heard their own barge whistle though there was no river in sight. It turned out to be a kestrel protecting its nest, a breed of bird that must have once lived by a river a hundred years before, whose sound had been borrowed and learned by generations of bargemen.
After that weekend, I wanted to keep helping The Darter with the dogs, but Rachel began spending more time with The Moth. I suspected she wanted to be more of an adult. But I’d be waiting for The Darter in my waterproof coat when he swung by in his car. He had barely concerned himself with me the first times we met at Ruvigny Gardens, when I was just some boy in a house he happened to be visiting. But I now discovered The Darter was an easy man to learn from. He cared less about you than The Moth did, but told you precisely what he needed you to do, as well as what about him was to be kept from others. “Breast your cards, Nathaniel,” he’d say, “always breast your cards.” What he needed, it turned out, was someone like me, a semi-reliable person to help him gather greyhounds two or three times a week from one of those silent European vessels, and so he persuaded me to leave my job at the restaurant and instead help him transport them in darkness on the mussel boat to various locations where a van would then spirit his living cargo further away.
We managed about twenty of those shy travellers on each boat ride. They sat shivering on deck during our journeys, which sometimes lasted as late as midnight, and were spooked easily by a loud noise or the searchlight of a launch suddenly alongside us. The Darter worried about what he called “preventative men,” and it meant I had to nuzzle my way into their midst under the blankets and calm them in the fetid dog air as the river police slid by. “They’re after more serious things,” The Darter announced, justifying his low-level criminality.
It became clear that what we were delivering had in fact no guarantee of financial success. There was no assurance about these animals as racing dogs, no knowledge whether they were fast or slow. All that was valuable about them was that they provided “the unknown element” and, as the public was uncertain about their worth, it guaranteed reckless betting—bets made by strangers relying on looks as opposed to authentic bloodlines that could recommend them or reveal them as worthless. A reckless bet meant active money. You put pound notes on a dog with no past because of a seemingly knowing glance from the leashed creature or the line of its thigh, or the overheard whisperings of others you hoped might know but in truth did not. The dogs we had were wastrels with no recorded past, either kidnapped from a château or saved from a meat factory to be given a second chance. They were as anonymous as roosters.
On the moonless night river I calmed them by simply raising my teenage head in a gesture of strictness whenever they attempted to bark. I felt I was quieting an orchestra, and it had the charm and pleasure of first power. The Darter stood at the wheelhouse guiding us through the night, humming “But Not for Me.” It always sounded like a sigh the way he sang it to himself, his mind elsewhere, barely conscious of the lyrics in his mouth. Besides, I knew the sadness of that song in no way reflected his intricately dovetailed relationships with women. I knew this from having to provide alibis for him or deliver false messages from a public phone box that would excuse his absence some evenings. Women could never be certain of his exact hours of work, let alone what the work actually was.
Those days and nights, as I began to enter the shadowy timetable of The Darter’s life, I found myself within a confabulist pattern that drew together barge smugglers, veterinarians, forgers, and dog tracks in the Home Counties. Bribed veterinarians provided distemper shots to these aliens. Sometimes we needed temporary boarding kennels. Forgers typed up canine birth certificates to provide evidence of owners in Gloucestershire and Dorset, where the dogs had supposedly been whelped—dogs that had never heard a word of English till now.
That first magical summer of my life we smuggled more than forty-five dogs a week at the height of the racing season, collecting the gun-shy creatures from a dock near Limehouse onto the mussel boat, and riding the river in darkness into the heart of London towards Lower Thames Street. Then we travelled back downriver the way we had come, and those late-night river returns, the boat now empty of dogs, were the only moments The Darter was free of his complicated schedules and there would be no interruptions. I was curious now about The Darter’s universe. And during those nights he talked openly about himself and the complexities of dog racing, and he occasionally questioned me. “You met Walter when you were very young? Isn’t that so?” he asked me once. And when I looked at him, startled, he withdrew the sentence like a too-forward hand on a thigh. “Ahh, I see,” he said.
When I asked him how he had met Olive Lawrence, I prefaced it by admitting to him that I liked her. “Oh, I noted that,” he said. This was a surprise, for The Darter had always appeared unaware of and unconcerned with my responses.
“So, how did you meet her?”
He pointed to the cloudless sky. “I needed advice, and she is this specialist…a geographer, an eth-nog-ra-pher.” He dragged the word out as she had done. “Who knew there were people like that? Who still read weather by the kind of moon it might be, or by the form of a cloud? Anyway, she was useful for something I was involved with, and I like women smarter than me. Mind you, she is…well, she surprises you. Those ankles! I didn’t think she’d walk out with me. She’s Mayfair, you know what I mean? She likes the lipstick, the silk. She’s a barrister’s daughter, but I don’t think the dad’s going to help me out if I’m in trouble. Anyway, she was going on about lenticular clouds and anvil clouds and how to read a blue sky. Though it was the ankles I was leaning towards. She’s got that greyhound line I appreciate, but you can never win, not with her. You can get hold of only a corner of her life. I mean, where is she now? Not a word from her. But still, that night with the goat, you know, I think she liked it. She wouldn’t admit it, of course, but it was like signing a peace treaty during our dinner. Quite a dame…but not for me.” I loved it when The Darter spoke this way, as if I were an equal who might understand those unstable subtleties in women. Besides, hearing another version of the goat incident was a further layering in the world that I was entering. I felt I was a caterpillar changing colour, precariously balanced, moving from one species of leaf to another.
We continued through the dark, quiet waters of the river, feeling we owned it, as far as the estuary. We passed industrial buildings, their lights muted, faint as stars, as if we were in a time capsule of the war years when blackouts and curfews had been in effect, when there was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river. I watched the welterweight boxer whom I once had percei
ved as harsh and antagonistic turn and look towards me, talking gently as he searched for the precise words about the ankles of Olive Lawrence, and about her knowledge of cyan charts and wind systems. I realized he had probably stored away that information for some aspect of his work, even as it also diverted him from that slow blue pulse at her neck.
He grabbed my arm, placed it on the wheel, and walked over to the edge to relieve himself into the Thames. He exhaled a groan. He always had some soundtrack alongside his actions, and I suspect it was there during amorous moments when the pulse at Olive Lawrence’s neck beat beneath a thin film of sweat. I recalled the first time I witnessed The Darter urinating, at the Dulwich Picture Gallery during a reconnaissance, whistling, the fingers of his right hand holding a cigarette as well as his penis, which was aimed towards the edge of the urinal. “Pointing Percy at the Porcelain,” as he called it. Now, as I steered the barge, I could hear that dutiful soliloquy. “I’ve found more clouds of grey—than any Russian play—could guarantee.” He murmured it within the privacy of himself, womanless at this late hour.
The barge slowed. We moored up tight against the fenders of the dock and climbed out. It was one in the morning. We walked to his Morris and sat there for a moment, paused, as if we were attaching ourselves now to another element. Then his foot pressed the clutch, the key turned, and the noise of the car broke the silence. He always drove quickly, almost dangerously, through the crosshatching of narrow, unlit streets. These were parts of the city that since the war were only partially lived in. We passed streets of rubble, now and then a bonfire. He lit a cigarette and kept the windows open. It was never a straight route home, he weaved left, right, certain when to slow, suddenly turning into an unseen lane as if testing a getaway route. Or did he need this risk taking to keep him awake at this hour? Is it safe? I mouthed The Moth’s question silently into the air outside my window. Once or twice, if he thought I was not tired, The Darter climbed out with false weariness and took my place in the passenger seat to let me drive. He’d give a sidelong glance as I dealt with the clutch and cluttered over Cobbins Brook Bridge. Then we drifted into the inner suburbs, our conversations ended by now.
I was often exhausted by these far-flung duties I was given. Bone and blood tests needed to be fictionalized. False seals from the Greater London Greyhound Association had to be forged so our immigrants could enter any of the one hundred and fifty dog tracks in the country, as if they all were preparing to gather at the Count of Monte Cristo’s ball with false identities. A vast mongrelization of pedigree dogs was taking place, and the greyhound industry would never recover from it. Before she departed, Olive Lawrence, upon discovering The Darter’s scheme, had rolled her eyes and remarked, “What next? Imported foxhounds? An imported child stolen from the Bordeaux region?”
“Of course it would be Bordeaux,” The Darter retaliated.
Still, it was our nights on the mussel boat I loved. The boat, originally a sailing kotter, had now been equipped with a modern diesel. The Darter was borrowing it from “a respected dockland merchant,” who needed it only three days a week; unless, he warned us, a royal wedding was suddenly announced, which would mean the hurried importation of cheap crockery with a royal image fired up and shipped from some satanic mill in Le Havre. In that event the transportation of dogs would have to be postponed. It was a long grey boat, built in Holland, he said, which used to coast low over mussel fields. It was distinct from other barges, and a rare object on the Thames. The ballast tank in the hold could open and fill with salt water, so that the gathered mussels could be stored and kept fresh until arriving at port. But the main virtue of the kotter for us was its shallow draught, which allowed us to travel the length of the Thames, from the estuary to as far west as Richmond, even Teddington where the river was too shallow for most tugs and barges. The Darter could also use it for other dealings, when he travelled into the channels and canals that led north and east out of the Thames towards Newton’s Pool and Waltham Abbey.
I still hold on to those names…Erith Reach, Caspian Wharf, as well as the streets I drove with The Darter, long past midnight into the city. We would have just completed one of our turbulent barge journeys and he would be trying to keep me awake by telling me plots of some of his favourite films. His voice took on an aristocratic pitch as he reenacted lines of dialogue from Trouble in Paradise: “Do you remember the man who walked into the Bank of Constantinople and walked out with the Bank of Constantinople? I am that man!” The car barrelled along the unlit roads, and he would turn towards me to regale me about Olive Lawrence’s habits during an argument, or rattle off the names of the key streets we were driving through—Crooked Mile, Sewardstone Street, or a cemetery we were passing—saying, “Learn these by heart, Nathaniel, in case I have to send you off one night on your own.” We moved at speeds so high we often reached the city in less than half an hour. Now and then there’d be lyrics The Darter would sing out loud, about “the bride—with the guy on the side” or “the dame—who was known as the flame.” He did this jauntily, suddenly gesturing with his arm as if he had to interrupt himself to remember one more example of deceitful passion that had just occurred to him.
* * *
—
Greyhound racing was already a jubilantly illegal profession. Millions of pounds changed hands. Huge crowds came to White City Stadium or the Bridge at Fulham, or visited the temporary tracks that had sprung up all over the country. The Darter had not leapt quickly into the business. First of all he investigated the territory. The sport had a pariah-like status and he knew there would eventually be government controls. Stern editorials in the Daily Herald were warning the public that there existed in greyhound racing “a moral decline that derived from passive leisure.” But The Darter did not feel the public’s leisure was passive. He’d been at Harringay when, after a three-to-one favourite was disqualified, the crowd burned the starting traps to the ground, he being one of many who was knocked flat by a water hose manned by the police. He guessed there would soon be dog licences, recorded bloodlines, stopwatches, even rules for the official speed of the mechanical hare. The possibilities of chance would grow small, betting would be based on reason. He needed to locate or invent a quick, slender entrance into the business, something up to now hidden from view, and squeeze himself into that margin between what had been thought about and what had not yet been considered. And what The Darter saw at the dog tracks was unjudgeable talent among indistinguishable creatures.
By the time we ran into him at Ruvigny Gardens he was importing a dubious population of unregistered foreign dogs. He had already spent a few years in the shifting tents of spivery. He had finessed the art of doping, not so much to give dogs strength and endurance, but to cause a hypnotic slowness in them, by feeding them Luminal, a tranquillizer used for epileptic seizures. The procedure involved careful timing. If they were given it too close to the beginning of a race, the animals would tumble into sleep in their starting gates and have to be carried away by one of the bowler-hatted stewards. But with a two-hour interval between consumption and the race they would run convincingly, then become dizzy when cornering the bends. Luminal-flavoured liver was administered to a particular group of dogs—for instance brindle dogs, or male dogs—so you could avoid betting on them.
Other concoctions invented on someone’s home chemistry set were tried. Dogs fed liquids gathered from human genitalia infected with a social disease suddenly became distracted by itching or were overpowered by unwanted erections and slowed down during the last hundred yards. The Darter then started using chloretone tablets, bought in bulk from a dentist and dissolved in hot water. Once again a hypnotic trance ensued. North American park rangers, he said, had been using it to anaesthetize trout during their tagging process.
Where and when in his past had The Darter learned about such chemical and medicinal information? I knew he was a curious man and could extract information from anyone, even an innoce
nt chemist sitting next to him on a bus. Much the way he had picked up details about weather systems from Olive Lawrence. Yet he did not reveal himself easily. A trait perhaps left over from his days as the boxer from Pimlico, when he was light on his feet while verbally solemn, enigmatic but curious about another’s body language—a counterpuncher, a close observer, and then a mocker of another man’s style. It was much later that I would make the connection between his familiarity with such drugs and his awareness of my sister’s epilepsy.
By the time I began working with him the golden years of doping were almost over. Thirty-four million people were attending greyhound races a year. But now the racing clubs were setting up saliva and urine tests, so The Darter needed to find another solution where betting on dogs would once again not rely only on logic and talent. What followed was The Darter’s use of imposters or ringers in order to bring confusion and chance back to the tracks, and I became fully caught up in his plans, accompanying him as often as I could on his barge, the flood tides carrying us into or out of London on those night journeys I sometimes still yearn for.