News from Norfolk

Sam only needed a few photos. He kept repeating this point. “They don’t even have to be good photos! This isn’t some school competition. But the publisher told me I have space for two more photos, and so I want two more photos. I’m greedy like that.”

“Surely you could just find something online?”

“No, I can’t just find something online, Olly! If the pictures were legit, I’d have to pay for them, and if they weren’t legit — well, you know me — I’d end up with some AI-generated slop that turned out to be a photograph of some random square in Iowa or Prague, with a statue of Generalissimo Franco imposed on it, probably with six fingers on each hand, and as much as I’d love some publicity for my book, that isn’t the strategy I’d choose, truth be told. Is it really that hard to take a few phone photos of Golden Square?”

As much as I hated to admit it, because younger brothers should never be encouraged in that way, Sam had a point. I was in London — he was in Scotland. It would not be difficult to swing past Golden Square on my way home from a Saturday morning spent in the office. It would certainly not be difficult to take a few phone photos and email them to him. Heaven knows, after the decades he’d endured, struggling away in variously underfunded and demoralised history faculties, we all knew how proud Sam was to have finished his first “proper” book, soon to be published by that rare thing, a still-prestigious university press. In short, I had no choice, really, but to agree to what he’d asked me to do.

And yet as I made my way through the raucous, charmless, just-under-control anarchy of Oxford Circus down into Soho, it became increasingly clear to me why I hadn’t returned to Golden Square since the late 1980s.

Everything had changed. In London, or at least the West End, this goes without saying. While the Soho I had known had hardly been that of de Quincey or Dickens, it had, at least, been recognisably that of Patrick Hamilton, Francis Bacon and all those Colony Room people, a place still somehow a bit grubby and tired from the long-ago war, its dank courts and alleyways haunted by a fug of stale cigarette smoke, cheap spirits and thwarted ambition.

Now, though, making my way through it purposefully, briskly, with what I hoped was an air of incurious objectivity — a tourist visiting, without any great interest, famous landmarks from my own distant past — I noted all the bright new shopfronts, smart cafés and bars, breezy culinary evocations of Brazil or Hawaii or Korea. Where there was graffiti, succinct and enigmatic, it was impossible to tell whether the gesture was one of rebellion or, rather, some form of sanctioned civic enrichment. Had it not been for the occasional stench of piss, the odd lurching junkie, I’d hardly have recognised the old place, so glossy and impersonal was its new surface. I found this reassuring.

There were two points, though, that I’d forgotten to take into account. First, because this was a day in late October, even though it was still mid afternoon, the light was already starting to slip away a little. I’d have to hurry to take those photos. Secondly, as I should really have remembered — although now the twins are grown up it’s less of a big deal — the day was, in fact, Hallowe’en.

Hallowe’en became, once I’d noticed it, increasingly hard to miss. Most of the restaurants and bars had been decorated, more or less tastefully, for the occasion. All possible surfaces were decked with garlands of tangerine paper jack-o’-lanterns, saw-toothed silhouettes of huge black cats with glowing eyes, skulls and candles, mocked-up mossy funerary slabs.

More to the point, though, many in the Saturday crowds that surged around me were in costume. Here, again, the level of commitment varied. A hen party stumbled past, unsteady and hilarious, all wearing witches’ hats — and, it would seem, very little else. Youths in black hoodies, tearing through on their bikes, had swapped balaclavas for far more evocative paper “scream” masks.

Most impressive, though, were the revenants and zombies. Most were solitary although sometimes they, too, travelled in groups. Festering sores, plague buboes, gently luminescent rotting flesh — making my way down Kingly Street, all of this was everywhere around me, to the extent that after a minute or two, human nature being what it is, I largely ceased to notice it.

This would all work best, I knew, if I could force myself to focus on the task at hand. It was better not to think too much. Instead, I concentrated on taking a few quick photos of the south end of Kingly Street, which Sam had requested.

The light that afternoon was being very kind to me. London, a city of lime-white, green and black, often looks its best in October, when the changing leaves offer the odd splash of old-gold or coppery-red counterpoint. This was one of those mid autumn days when the fast-scudding clouds meant that light effects altered with every minute, sometimes every second. I resolved to snap what I could, carelessly, in the way that a bad photographer might, hoping that something would, despite the mess I had made of it, work out.

And, certainly, Golden Square looked wonderful in that last blaze of afternoon sunshine. Of course it, too, had changed. I noted this with a degree of conscious relief. Why had I thought that, more than three decades on, a very ordinary London square would still have the power to hurt me? No, the place I had dreaded seeing again was gone — well, nearly gone — transformed by a few new buildings, cleaner façades, sparklingly clear glass, present-day cars — present-day people in their present-day clothes who neither knew nor cared what might or might not have happened there, long before half of them were even born.

No, it was only in the bones of the place — the proportions, the width of the streets, the plane trees, that strangely uninviting seating area at its centre — that any tactless hint of the past still remained. Well, that and some of the buildings: a tiny handful of Georgian survivors, the old Dormeuil building (much renovated), and then across the square, the back of Warwick Street Chapel. The building I least wanted to see had, thankfully, been demolished and wholly rebuilt.

I steadied my breathing. I waited for a moment until the thumping of my heart was no longer louder than the crowds shoving past all around me. It was better not to think too much. I needed to take some photos. Once I’d done that, then I could leave.

Did you know that I used to be quite a good photographer? That was the point of Sam’s reference to school prizes — I used to win them all the time — at Oxford, too. There was even a point where I thought, briefly, that I might be able to make a career in conflict photojournalism — until I met a few of war photographers, and realised the toll that kind of work exacts.

These days, anyway, all my old cameras, light meters and extortionately expensive lenses are packed away in a box, under the twins’ baby toys, Annie’s old scripts and theatre stuff, and the other useless rubbish we always say we should sort through and probably sell or bin — although, of course, we never do.

Sam had told me a little about which parts of Golden Square he wanted me to photograph. Again, the light was kind to me. Although the clouds, restless and unreliable, occasionally veiled the street scene with a sulky kind of shadow, they were quick to lift away the veil again, so that what was left of the sunshine could pick out every hint of texture or articulation with a magnificent, almost hallucinogenic clarity.

For a while, I took my photos from the pavement surrounding the central square. Next, I decided to shoot from within the square itself. The sun was catching the edges of the leaves of some of the plane trees, setting them alight with what I knew would be a very short-lived ardour. Golden Square indeed!

I was concentrating, as you can see, on my photos and on my phone. I was doing this very consciously. It was better not to think too much. As long as I focused on the project at hand, it would all be all right.

It took me a while, then, to realise that there was a woman seated on the bench, next to where I was standing. I had honestly thought there was no one at all in the square. Yet there she was — only a few feet distant from me. I remember noting, right away, one odd thing about her, which is that she wasn’t looking, as a normal person would do, into a mobile phone.

Instead, the woman was staring at me. That, too, was slightly odd. Her look was hard to read, because while she was looking at me very intensely, there was nothing aggressive or challenging about her — just a deep curiosity, with something strangely innocent about it.

I suppose I had better describe her. She must have been about forty years old, but it was hard to tell. She had clearly lived a hard life. Like so many on the streets that evening, she was dressed and made up for Hallowe’en — yet with a bit more subtlety than many, because rather than being covered with cosmetic sores and so forth, hers was only a gently greenish pallor, a bit of shading so that her eyes and cheeks looked only slightly sunken, her lips only slightly blue.

She must, once, have been very beautiful. She carried herself as if she were used to being admired, and I have to admit that there was, even in the ruins of that beauty, something weirdly compelling. Her eyes, meeting mine directly, seemed to say quite a few contrasting things all at once — conveying a kind of rueful amusement, a companionable openness, a resolute cheerfulness hiding something else in its shadow.

She was dressed, as many were that night, in a miscellaneous agglomeration of vintage fashion — I recall, variously, lace, gold brocade and some rather elaborate, fake-looking jewellery — all a bit grubby and worn. She carried with her a sort of large bag, almost like a rucksack, made of gold brocade, again a bit worn and dingy, tied at the top with a velvet ribbon.

“A fine evening, is it not?” she asked me. Her accent, again, was hard to place. It certainly wasn’t from London. What it recalled to me, more than anything, was an accent one doesn’t hear any more, but that still used to surface occasionally around Oxford back in the 1980s — a real West Country burr, although there was something more to it than that.

“Yes, it’s a beautiful evening,” I replied.

I could have left right then, because I had already taken all the pictures that I needed. Sam would be pleased, I knew. And yet I also knew, because of the way in which the clouds were banking up, that if I waited just a few minutes longer, there was the chance of the kind of sunset that would cast a last burst of red-gold light across everything, and that the result, if I could catch it, would be pure magic.

At this point, I don’t think I was even trying to take a photo for Sam. No, in attempting to take these photos, something had woken up in me — that raw hunter-gatherer impulse, to go out and bag the best photo humanly possible, whatever the cost. Isn’t it curious that, in English, instead of “making” photos, we “take” them — with that definite sense of predator and prey? I have often wondered why that is the case. In any event, it expresses something real.

For that reason, anyway, I was in no particular hurry to leave. Nor did this woman concern me. True, I found it hard to place her in one of those lazy categories that circumscribe and organise urban life. Which is to say, although I thought she might perhaps have been drinking, she didn’t seem to me to be a rough sleeper, and although she was quick to strike up a conversation, she somehow didn’t seem to me to be a whore, either.

If anyone had asked me, I suppose I would have guessed, in all innocence, that she was a Saturday afternoon reveller, come up to the West End to enjoy herself, waiting at this designated meeting place for the arrival of a slightly-delayed friend.

I sat down on the bench, and started looking at the photos I had already taken. I was quite pleased with them. But when I turned back to the woman, she was still staring at me. Again, there was nothing threatening in her look — I did not, for instance, think she was going to steal my phone. Instead, there was only a sort of gentle bemusement.

“It’s busy here tonight, isn’t it?” I said, if only because it seemed I ought to say something.

“It is. But then it’s always busy on this night. That’s always been the way of it.”

“There are certainly some excellent costumes,” I opined.

“Ah, yes,” the woman replied. “But then, there’s no lack of fine ladies and gentlemen hereabouts. This is a fine square, and it always were.” She looked around complacently. And then she laughed, with a funny sort of anxious trill. “Not just walking about, neither!”

I must have looked a bit blank, because she then elaborated on her previous comment.

“Under the earth, I mean, darling. Under this earth. Or did you not know? This place were once a plague pit, and they never took up the dead, neither, but just set this square over them, because there be no one who wanted their house built on the houses of the dead.”

***

As it happened, I knew that Golden Square was built on a plague pit.

Back in the late 1980s, when I worked in Golden Square, we used to joke about it all the time. Only Cara didn’t think it was at all funny. I suppose it’s because she came from a place where epidemic diseases and mass mortality events weren’t entirely a thing of the past. She’s just cross herself, and sometimes tell us that we shouldn’t laugh about that kind of thing — which, of course, because we were young and very stupid, made us do it all the more.

Did you know that I had a year in London, between my undergraduate degree and all the military stuff? Well, I did. I was working for a tiny think tank — you wouldn’t have heard of it; it hasn’t existed for decades now — on a one-year internship programme. Its office was in Golden Square. The main skill I took away from the experience was the ability to pretend, in front of people who knew a huge amount about a given subject area, that I, too, knew a great deal about it, possibly even more than they did. This ability has served me extremely well over the years, and I am grateful for it.

There were perhaps a dozen of us in the office, plus a few distinguished elderly people who dropped in from time to time, chiefly before or after lunch at their various London clubs. I cannot pretend that we didn’t enjoy ourselves. We were young — the same age as the twins are! now, there’s a thought — and, what’s more, we benefitted fully from that absolute clarity of vision that stems from being at the start of our lives, having just come down from Oxford, knowing more about everything than anyone else had ever known before, and all set, in a leisurely way, to assume our rightful places as world-historical figures.

And that, of course, is how I met Cara. She, too, had been awarded a one-year internship. She was pretty — not remarkably so, it must be said — but sweet-natured, modest and gentle. Having come to the UK from somewhere else, she must have been able to see through so much of our tiresome, laddish, loutish bravado — and yet her reaction was generally one of bemused, affectionate tolerance.

Cara was, other than two elderly, no-nonsense, wholly terrifying secretaries, the only female in the building. It was inevitable, I suppose, the 1980s being what they were, that she’d end up with one of us, and I cannot deny that there was more than a hint of competitive spirit in our various attempts to befriend her — nor, indeed, that I was rather pleased, albeit for purely competitive reasons, when she ended up, for a few months, partnered with me.

We were young, and I was very stupid. My experiences with women up to that point had been few, inglorious and almost invariably embarrassing.

Yet there was a time when Cara and I were, in some sense, very happy together. Golden Square, cold and wet and squalid, became our own little garden of Eden. We’d sit out on a damp, cold bench — a bench, let us remember, set over a vast 17^th century plague pit — under the dripping plane trees, surrounded by drunks and rough sleepers, and talk for hours and hours.

Cara’s English was terrible, by the way, but at that point it didn’t really matter. When I had money, we’d go for a drink in a nearby pub, back in the days when the white wine that she preferred was sold unbranded, poured from a slightly dusty bottle kept corked in some cosy corner, tucked away behind the array of spirits. She pretended not to mind. Under the cover of darkness, we’d kiss in sordid alleys, with bags of rubbish piled up around us, or round the backs of now-demolished buildings, catching odd views of the intricate geometry of fire exits soaring above us, or the occasional frightened rat. Cara had beautiful eyelashes, a soft neck and magnificently warm little hands. Her absolute seriousness was, oddly, no small part of her charm.

My garden of Eden metaphor, though, implies the existence of a serpent. We met ours, ironically enough, at the Warwick Street Chapel, also in Golden Square.

It must have been raining that day, hence our desire to find some place near the office where we could sit, perhaps talk a little, but mostly just be alone together, even for the length of an admittedly 1980s-style lunch hour.

We had visited the chapel before. Do you know it? You should definitely call in next time you are passing! By the standards of functioning Roman Catholic churches in this country, it’s very old — it started out as the chapel for the Portuguese embassy back in the early 1700s. It’s rather beautiful, too, if you like that sort of thing — gold-ground mosaics, incense, the light of guttering candles. Anyway, sometimes Cara and I would go inside and sit together, holding hands. Because she was a devout Roman Catholic, she positively refused to let me kiss her there, even if there was clearly no one about at all.

Well, we had sat together, heads on each other’s shoulders, talking nonsense, or simply enjoying the silence — and then, when it was late enough that we really did have to go back to the office, we rose to leave. It was only then that, rather shyly and in her signature terrible English, Cara suggested that perhaps our wedding, when it happened, ought to take place there.

Well, the whole thing was impossible. Cara, as I have said, was pretty — pretty enough, if not remarkably so — but her prettiness was the sort that depended on youth, a degree of freshness and limited alternatives. Her English really was woefully, painfully bad. Physical attraction aside, we had very little in common. I knew, by that point, that I wanted a military career, complete with plenty of travel and adventure. More to the point, however, I knew that there was literally no way that I could possibly ever marry Cara. I did not want to spend my life with her. With all the boundless wisdom of my 22 years, I attributed this difference of perspective to Cara’s unworldliness, her lack of sophistication, perhaps even her lesser intelligence.

So as we stepped out into the rain, walking round to a very grey Golden Square, a chill fell over us that would never, thereafter, really be dispelled. It was as if we could hear the gates of paradise slamming shut behind us.

Later there were tears, recriminations, rows conducted on those benches to the vague amusement of passing strangers, a half-hearted reconciliation or two that never lasted very long — and after that, what? In truth, I cannot really remember, so thoroughly did I blot the whole thing out of my memory. I cannot remember the last time we spoke, or saw each other. We never, as far as I can remember, actually said goodbye.

And then, a few years later, came Annie, and the twins, and all that. So I’ve really been very lucky, haven’t I? It’s all worked out very well.

No, I never really stopped to think about what happened to Cara, after Golden Square. I suppose she must have gone back to her own country. I am sure she met someone who was right for her. I hope that’s what happened.

We called her Cara, but her real first name was slightly different — and her surname is a very common one, at least in her country, and of course if she’s married, she’d have a different surname now anyway.

What’s the point of thinking about the past? Often, very often, it’s better not to think too much — far better just to get on with the job at hand.

***

“Are you quite well, my darling?” asked the woman. She had moved closer to me on the bench. Again, though, I felt no alarm. She smelled of old-fashioned scent, camphor and cheap sherry.

“Sorry,” I said, sitting up straight again. “I’ve had a bit of a cold. I’m just getting over it.”

“I’m cold, too,” said the woman, reflectively. “I been cold for a long time. For a long time, that’s been the way of it.”

I shook myself a little. The clouds were still gathering and there was still quite a lot of light about. I still wanted my photos.

“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked, just to make conversation.

“Oh, yes, that I am,” said the woman. “Only he’s a long time in coming. He promised he’d come back, but that’s the thing — he’s a long time in coming. All the same, I don’t believe that he would just leave me here. Not after everything we been through.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said, emolliently. “Something’s probably just held him up. I’m sure he’ll be along before too long.”

“Men be easily distracted,” reflected the woman, without rancour. “He were always easily distracted, my Robert was.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, with a sympathetic smile. “There are plenty of distractions! Well, hopefully he’ll be along soon.”

The light was beginning to change. Almost imperceptibly, dressed stone walls that had, just a moment before, appeared an unremarkable grey, suddenly blushed red. So did the crowds that were still ebbing and flowing in front of them. It was as if the colour were coming from within the stone itself. Reflected light gave everything in the square a strange sort of glow. This was the moment. I rose to take a few photos. I fiddled with the settings on my phone camera. I focused on the job at hand. I moved around a bit, so that the leaves on the trees would frame the buildings in a more attractive, consciously-constructed way. But then I felt something pulling at my jacket. Crossly, I brushed it away — and then did so again.

The light was truly extraordinary — positively unearthly. I cursed myself for not having brought a better camera with me. Also, I cursed whoever it was who kept tugging at my jacket, brushing up against me, jostling me. I can’t explain this well, but there was something repulsively needy about that tugging, that increasingly enraged me. I wanted, not only to fight free of it, but to make sure it never happened again.

Yet when I turned around to remonstrate with the woman — because, of course, I had assumed that she was the one who was doing it — she was just sitting on the bench, a couple of yards distant, watching me, still with that curious, oddly innocent look on her greenish-grey face.

And then the light failed — suddenly, as that sort of evening light always does. The fire had turned to ash. Equally suddenly, I realised that I actually felt really unwell. That weird jostling, surely, was just some species of dizziness? My heartbeat roared in my ears, louder than the crowds on the pavements opposite — for the square itself was, for whatever reason, still quite remarkably empty.

Staggering slightly, I made it as far as the bench. I sat down again.

The woman, paler than ever now that the sky was no longer red, looked curiously at me. I think she wanted to comfort me. Then she spoke. “There, my darling, the one you are waiting for — she’ll be along soon. I know she’s been a long time coming, but she’s almost here now.”

In vain did I protest that I wasn’t waiting for anyone, that I hadn’t been waiting for anyone at all. The woman simply looked at me. In the gathering dusk it was harder to see her face, to gauge her expression. I found myself shouting at her, insisting that I wasn’t waiting, that I really wasn’t waiting for anyone. But now there were tears running down my cheeks, tears dampening my hands as I tried, blindly and helplessly, to brush them away.

“There, there, my darling,” the woman said, in that odd West Country burr. “Never you mind. Never you mind your Lizzy! Robert always tells me I’m full of foolishness. Robert’s a long time in coming, but he’ll come for me, that I know. He doesn’t have it in him just to leave me, after everything we been through. Don’t cry, darling! Here, let your Lizzy find you a pretty handkerchief.”

The woman reached down to that brocade bag that she had been carrying — I could just about see that in what was left of the light. With those pale, thin, bony hands, she undid the velvet ribbon. And then she opened up the bag.

And here is the part of the story that I know, however I try, I will never be able to make anyone properly understand.

As the woman opened the bag, I was overcome by the most terrible wave of sadness I have ever known in my entire life. I don’t mean that I simply felt sad. I really don’t mean that. No, there was a genuine physicality to it — truly, as if I were standing in shallow water and all of a sudden a wave came along and knocked me flat — only the wave was made up out of every bit of longing, loneliness, sorrow, regret, shame, grief and total human despair that had ever existed. It was as if the sort of armour that protects people from all that sort of thing was suddenly, painfully, stripped away from me — as if there were literally nothing else in the world but sadness and loss.

It was, in short, the most terrible thing I have known in all my years. I could feel, all too clearly, as if the weight of this sadness were starting to crush the life out of my body — as if it had already started to crush whatever was left of my soul.

I had fallen over on the bench by then, and was gasping for breath, clutching the side of the seat, unable to move away, to speak, even to form coherent thoughts.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry!” I heard the woman say. “I always forget! No wonder my Robert calls me a foolish woman. I’m so sorry, darling!” And she was fumbling to close up the bag again, to tie up the ribbon.

Then another voice — a male one. “Is he okay?”

“Oh, he’s fine, darling, only he’s been waiting ever such a long time for her — she’s been a long time in coming.”

“You don’t want me to ring the police or nothing?”

“Oh no, he’ll be fine.”

With enormous effort, I managed to sit up properly again. I could just about see a couple of young zombies standing in front of me, caked in dried blood and oozing sores, looking concerned. “You okay, mate?”

“Thanks, I’m fine,” I said, although I was conscious that my voice sounded all wrong. “I just had a bit of a funny turn. I’m better now.”

“Well, all right, then,” said one of the zombies, a bit doubtfully. “Like, stay safe, okay, mate?” And with that, they left.

I rose, slowly and painfully, to follow them. But first, I turned back towards the woman, who was still looking at me. “I hope he turns up soon, your Robert,” I said. “You’re — you’re a kind soul, Lizzy. You deserve better. I’m sorry you’ve had to wait so long.”

“Never you mind,” said the woman, evenly. “Only if you meet him on your way, my Robert, can you tell him that his Lizzy is here, in Golden Square, waiting up for him? Oh, I know all about that Mary of his, don’t you doubt that, I know all how he’s wronged me — men are like that — but I don’t care. One day, he’ll come back. And until then, I’ll just wait.”

***

It gets dark quite early at the end of October. Fortunately, the main door of the Warwick Street chapel was still open.

There, at least, very little had changed. The candles still guttered, so that the gold-ground mosaic in the apse glittered and sparkled and shimmered. The air still smelled of incense. It was very quiet there, too, after the clamour of the streets outside.

I sat down in a pew — but then, on an impulse, knelt instead. And then I prayed for a while, fervently if not very coherently. I was out of practice. Still, perhaps it did some good.

I had thought I was alone there. When I rose, though, and was starting to leave, I could see that near the front of the church, a youngish woman was also kneeling, arms thrown across the back of the seat in front of her. It was hard to tell whether she was praying very passionately, or perhaps just sleeping a bit between a day job and a night job. I went out, closing the door silently so as not to wait her, into the loud amoral chaos of the Hallowe’en crowds, the timeless, callous, unchanging turbulence of the West End.

***

Sam rang me up later that night, once I was back home in Fulham with Annie.

We’d had dinner and a couple of glasses of rosé, and were watching some familiar box-set — it doesn’t matter which. The room was warm, cosy — very ordinary. A dog or two snored on the sofa alongside us. I was amazed, reflecting on it, at the speed and thoroughness with which the world had come to seem almost normal again.

“Happy Hallowe’en! Thanks for the photos. I owe you one, Olly — they’re perfect. That light! I don’t know how you do it. You really haven’t lost your touch. I only hope the photos don’t distract readers from the brilliant incisiveness of my prose, or the unparallelled scope and originality of my research.”

To change the subject, I took the conversation in a different direction. “I should have asked this earlier, really, but what’s the deal with Golden Square? I know history isn’t my thing, but I can’t see the connection with Scotland and Legacies of Empire, or whatever you’re calling it now.”

Sam paused for a moment, in the way of someone who knows a great deal hence becomes wholly inarticulate when asked to condense it. “It’s a sad story, really. Also, it’s not even that central to the theme of the book —”

“Now you tell me ….”

“Oh, but some stories are just too good to leave out! There’s only so many pages of imperial trade statistics and so forth that anyone can bear — everyone loves a little shot of human interest now and then.”

“Sentimental freak.”

“Yeah, that’s me.

“So, anyway, here’s the story, since you asked. Once upon a time, there was a really horrible man called Robert Cunyngham. He started out in Ayrshire — a penniless orphan, from a gentry family that was ruined in the Civil Wars. He left for the Caribbean in his early teens. There, he married a very rich woman and managed to make a fortune in the sugar, with a sideline in the slave trade. When he was almost 50 years old, he came to London to deal with a law suit. He took rooms in King Street — which is now Kingly Street — and, later, he had a house in Golden Square.”

“That doesn’t seem the saddest story I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s the way I tell them. Seriously, though, there’s more.

“When Robert was in London, he met a girl named Elizabeth. She lived in the same lodging house. She was young enough to be his daughter.

“Different people tell this story different ways, but one way or the other — willingly or not; it’s a pretty unpleasant business — she ended up as his mistress. He seems to have promised her that when his wife died, he’d marry her.

“Well, eventually his wife died, and at that point, there may or may not have been some sort of semi-clandestine marriage contracted between Robert and Elizabeth. Once again, it’s a real “he said, she said” nightmare.

“What clearly did happen, though, is that after they were together for about fifteen years, an even younger woman — Mary — spotted an opportunity. She’s been a sort of rackety camp-follower, vaguely attached to an army officer who dumped her the moment he was able to marry a very wealthy, well-connected widow. So Mary, who seems to have been pretty cynical herself, got her talons into onto Robert. She convinced him to leave Elizabeth, move back to Scotland, to live rather grandly there, and also — unfortunately — to marry her.

“Robert was, at that point, possibly senile, but certainly very unwell. Elizabeth wrote him letters that are painful to read. She must have been relatively well educated, because she wrote the letters herself — and believe me, they are real, raw shrieks of pain — just horrible, even three centuries on.”

My cold was clearly getting worse because when I tried to speak, it took a few tries before the words came out. “Ah, okay, that’s sad.”

“You all right? You sound awful, Ollie.”

“Yeah, I know — it’s just a bad cold. What — what happened to Elizabeth?”

“No one knows, really. After Robert died, there was litigation about the various marriages — that’s why there’s a record of all this — but as Mary could afford the better legal support, unsurprisingly, Mary ended up with all Robert’s money. Elizabeth ended up with nothing. And after that ….”

“What happened to her?”

“I’m getting to that. See, the problem is that she had a very ordinary name, and we’re not even sure of her date of birth, so basically it’s “choose your own adventure” time when looking at the records.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure you’re okay? I mean that there are various Elizabeths who might or might not have been “our” Elizabeth. One had a happy ending — she married a well-to-do gentleman and seems to have lived a very calm life after that.”

“And the others?”

“Well, there are several others, so we can’t really know. But one of them, certainly, died in a rented room south of St James’s Park, down near what’s now Victoria Street, very poor, all alone — and she died by her own hand.”

We were both silent for a moment, until it became embarrassing.

It was Sam who broke the silence. “It’s strange, I know, because it’s not even the only time Golden Square was associated with that sort of thing. It has form.”

“Does it?”

“Seriously, Ollie, are you okay? I’m feeling bad about having sent you out taking photos — it doesn’t sound as if it did you much good.”

“Yeah, it’s just this stupid cold. What do you mean about Golden Square?”

“Only that it’s where Thomas de Quincey basically dumped his girlfriend — it’s in his memoirs. He told her that when he made some money, he’d come back and find her, and they could be married and live happily ever after — but of course, he didn’t.”

“Bastard. Now that’s a sad story.”

“Yes, and it’s funny it happens in exactly the same place.

“But then when you think of it, there have been so many lives lived in London. It’s like cart tracks, isn’t it? The first few carts follow the same path, almost by accident — then after a century or two, the tracks made by the wheels are so deep that it’s almost as if they have no choice.”

I must have stayed silent for a little too long, yet again, because, once more, it was Sam who spoke.

“I’ll tell you another thing, too, about Golden Square. You won’t believe this, but apparently there was a plague pit there, during the Great Plague of London. People quote ridiculous statistics about how many people were chucked into that pit — thousands and thousands — but in any event there clearly was, truly, a plague pit there. That was why the developers never built over it. Apparently, no one wanted to live in houses built over thousands of dead people.

“Unfortunately, though, there isn’t really scope to mention that in the book. I just thought, well — I just thought it was sort of interesting.”