Regent’s Park, however, is surrounded by expensive houses standing on land that also belongs to the Queen – and they can’t be bought, only rented, even though it may be for a hundred or two hundred years, so none of the residents in these luxurious mansions and apartments that cost millions can truly say ‘my home is my castle’. But that didn’t seem to bother anyone very much – at any rate, as I walked along the side of the park I spotted a parked Bentley with a number plate that read ARMANI and a couple of people with faces that I’d seen in films, or on the front pages of the newspapers.
Well, anyway, if you’ve lived in this world for three hundred years and have still not accumulated enough money to settle anywhere you fancy – then you’re a total idiot. Of course, there are people like that to be found even among Prophets, but Erasmus was clearly not one of them. So of course he could afford a little mansion close to Regent’s Park.
However, the reality exceeded all my expectations.
Rather than using schematic tourist maps or the more detailed police variety, I relied on my phone with its built-in GPS system. I didn’t want to gape at the little screen like some crazy gadget-fanatic, so I simply clipped on the earphone and walked along, following the commands dictated by the pleasant female voice. As everyone knows, apart from the standard voices you can find hundreds of patches for GPS systems on the Internet: if you prefer, you can have your route indicated to you by a grandiloquent Gorbachev or a punch-drunk Yeltsin or a fussy Medvedev, and for the true connoisseur there is even Lenin – ‘You are on the right road, comrades!’ and Stalin – ‘Deviate to the right!’ My soundtrack imitated some old film: ‘To the left, milord,’ ‘To the right, milord,’ and I liked that – somehow it seemed to fit well with Erasmus.
Well, first I walked along Albany Street, glancing curiously at the expensive mansions and old buildings, either of red brick with little towers and bay windows, or with white walls and columns. It was a very touristy district, so I also came across the famous red telephone booths (strangely enough, in this age of digital mobile phones, people were still using them) and the impressive cylindrical forms of the Royal Mail’s postboxes (and people dropped letters into them in front of my very eyes). All this retro that the tourists go dewy-eyed for really did look quite natural, not at all affected, and yet again I was stung by sad thoughts of Moscow. What could my city have been like if it had not been demolished, reconstructed and torn to pieces in order to squeeze profit out of every single clod of earth? Completely different from this, of course, but also alive and interesting – not the present soulless agglomeration of bleak new developments and dilapidated Stalin-era blocks with only rare, usually completely reconstructed old buildings.
The GPS whispered: ‘To the left, milord.’ Obediently walking in through one of the entrances to Regent’s Park, I found myself in a kingdom of mighty trees, fragrant flowers and people strolling along paths. Probably less than a third of them were actual Londoners – most were tourists with cameras.
I wondered where Erasmus actually lived. In a little shack surrounded by his beloved plants?
I suppressed an urge to glance at the screen. It was more interesting to follow the commands. The system’s memory included even the narrowest little paths, and I followed them deeper and deeper into the park. There wasn’t any real wilderness here, of course, there couldn’t possibly be, but I encountered fewer and fewer tourists.
Then I saw a huge building that seemed to me to stand in the park itself, or right on its very edge. In actual fact, there was an avenue running along the boundary of the park, and a house had been built on it. It reminded me most of all of the finest examples of architecture from the Stalinist period – there were even statues on the cornice under the roof, only I couldn’t make out who exactly they represented: mythological characters, maybe, or important British cultural or political figures, or representatives of the various peoples of Britain. To judge from the cars parked by the building it was inhabited by people with millions in their bank accounts.
But the GPS led me further along the avenue.
So did he really live in a little shack, then?
‘Straight ahead, milord,’ said the GPS. ‘We’re arriving now, milord.’
I halted in bewilderment. There in front of me was an old church. Well, maybe not a church, but something ecclesiastical – an abbey, or a monastic building, constructed in a strange architectural style, with two wings, like a country-estate house but quite clearly some kind of religious edifice.
‘To the right, milord.’
The right wing of the building looked rather different. Well, there were the same moss-covered walls, stained-glass windows and tall, carved wooden doors. But it was a dwelling house. Or, rather, the residential section of the abbey or church.
Well, and why not, if I thought about it? Especially in England. If there’d been a church here it would have had a house for a priest – or, rather, a vicar. Let God have the church and the people have the house. No services would have been held here for a long, long time, and the vicar’s descendants – stop, could he have had any descendants? Probably he could, vicars weren’t celibate like Catholic priests – they had chosen a different path. And, sooner or later, someone had sold the house to Erasmus. Or perhaps the house had belonged to the Darwin family and he had inherited it.
The door opened just as I walked up to it and stopped, wondering what to do – press the button of the bell, or knock with the heavy bronze knocker. An elderly, fat, grey-haired gentleman in an old-fashioned tweed suit looked at me curiously.
‘Mr Darwin?’ I asked.
‘Monsieur Antoine?’ He had either completely assimilated his image as a Frenchman or he couldn’t quite get used to the idea that I wasn’t a Gaul. But the archaisms had almost completely disappeared from his speech. ‘Come in. I’ve been waiting for you for ages.’
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I replied automatically.
A historical film could have been shot in Erasmus Darwin’s residence. Several, in fact. The kitchen into which I followed my host was equipped according to the very latest word in 1970s technology. Or, more precisely, the American 1970s, with lots of chrome and glass and touchingly naive design work. Darwin prepared coffee in a huge machine with a glass container for coffee beans on top of it. As it ground the beans, the machine rumbled like an airliner taking off. Standing on one of the tables under the colourful stained-glass windows was a bright, gleaming antique food processor, with CUISINART written on its side. The fridge was also a brand that I didn’t know.
Carrying a tray, on which he had placed coffee cups, a cream jug and a sugar bowl, Erasmus led me into the sitting room. Here the 1970s capitulated ingloriously to the 1920s or 1930s – superbly polished leather furniture and dark wood everywhere – in the wall panels as well as the furniture – a marble fireplace … in which, to my amazement, genuine logs were burning! As far as I was aware, that was strictly forbidden – at one time, to combat the famous London smog, all the fireplaces in the city had been converted for gas. There was no TV, of course, but there was a valve radio, housed in a substantial wooden cabinet that looked like a small cupboard.