You will hand me what I want and hold the fort in case of accidents, and generally lend me the moral support you’ve made me require. It’s a luxury, Bunny, but I found it devilish difficult to do without it after you turned pi!
Raffles’ rooms at the Albany were, as I have described elsewhere, more befitting of a minor poet than the gentleman and cricketer he was. We spent many a happy hour in those rooms—and many unhappy, though fewer of those, thankfully—and even now, I can see them in my mind’s eye as clearly as were I still in them.
They were gutted after Raffles was tried and found guilty in absentia. Searched from top to bottom, wall to wall, even beneath the floorboards by sacrilegious officers of the law who hoped to find further evidence against him and against me. The manager of the building must have been furious; always a fussy, persnickity little man, I don’t doubt he was more angered by the disruption to his building by the police than by A. J.’s criminality bringing it into disrepute. People would much sooner move into the former rooms of an infamous criminal than into rooms with stripped wallpaper and bared floorboards—especially at the Albany’s prices!
I thought about those rooms a great deal whilst I was in prison. On my darker days, and of them there were many, I would lie back on my cot, flea-ridden and hard, and close my eyes, imagining I was instead sprawled back on A.J.’s comfortable, worn sopha. I would imagine until my head ached with the effort of it; until I could feel the warmth of the crackling fire, hear the bustling of the street below, smell the Sullivan’s smoke and coffee which promised his presence; promised his hand on my shoulder and voice in my ear; promised that Raffles would be there beside me if only I kept my eyes shut tight.
The Albany is still there, of course, as are Raffles’ rooms. I don’t doubt that his sopha, his bookcases, his desk, his bed, all of the large furniture which was already present when he first moved in was all eventually set back in order once the police had got their hands into every crack and nook they wanted. It is only Raffles who is removed; Raffles and every trace of him.
I tried to envision it. Every time I was jolted back from my precious illusions to cold reality, lying on that damned cot in that damned gaol, I would force myself to imagine instead someone new in those rooms; try to convince myself that drinking the wolfsbane and ruby grape of pleasant memory would be far more damaging in the long term than accepting harsh reality as it was. Raffles was gone.
And so, I turned my imagination to evicting him. I tried to imagine his bookshelves no longer bearing Rossetti and Keats and Browning and Shakespeare and Verne but filled instead with books of science, mathematics, engineering, or dry legal tomes, the duller the better; or better yet, bereft of all but the most run-of-the-mill bulk-purchased books-for-show, a library of the wilfully yet shamefacedly illiterate, bought in wholesale to mislead one’s friends into believing one cares for higher things than horses and baccarat. I tried to imagine his Indian rugs replaced with dull mats; a blank wall where his Blessed Damozel once hung; the garden of The Strawberry Thief little more than yet another suburban lawn. Time and again I burned his rooms to ashes in my mind, burned him out of them to burn them from my memories. I wanted to set his inferno ablaze and in turn set myself free of him…
