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Tideway extracts
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Public
Records Office ‘If you would see something quite dreadful , go to the enormous palace in the Strand, called Somerset House… What can men do in such a catacomb?’ Taine –‘Notes sur Angleterre’ Ink comes in on the tide and with the watermen and moths cuts up the stairs. Witnesses crowd the courtyard in pairs, details are lost in the rain. Behind the dead windows darkness is swallowing the Aula lucis, the hall of light, like a sword: year by year, marriage by marriage, a steady hand. Last night, another murder in the watergardens. Torches doused, the facts sit in pools on the flags and that blind old allegory the Thames refuses to speak. No mention here of those unaccountably let off the hook, of the dates they were not with their friends in the runaway hackneys, the train wrecks or warships which broke like a biscuit, cordite gangfiring back like a family tree through torpedo room, ocean, the North Sea, past sandbanks and home. In the river, the house and its offices hang like a ship smeared with soot and the memory of flame underwater. |