Via Bank or Via Charing Cross

Not very many years ago, my wife, in the way of wives who think their husbands just need more to occupy them and that will solve everything, bought me a ten week Introduction To Furniture Restoration course. And so, on a damp Wednesday evening in October, I found myself with a dozen other similarly aged men, in the workshop of a college in Kentish Town. We were allowed to bring our own pieces to work on if we wished but having no easy way to transport the Victorian writing desk I had designs on stripping and French polishing, I was provided instead with a stair banister.

"A doozy of a piece," the instructor told me. "At least two coats of paint and some fantastic dents and scratches."

"Everyone gets a banister if they don't bring their own piece," the man on the bench next to mine said. "I think they have a sideline restoring staircases."

He introduced himself as Owen Leigh. He was not actually attending the course, although he said he had in the past, but had come to an arrangement whereby he could use a bench on Wednesday nights to work on a small octagonal table. A family piece, he said.

We became, if not friends, then friendly, and we chatted as we gingerly scraped away at our respective paint-encrusted treasures. If I bonded with him at all it was at half past nine when the instructor told us to pack up and suggested a pint in the pub across the road. I had recently stopped drinking and did not want to be around people who were. I made some excuse about needing to get home and Owen immediately said he did too and I got the impression he understood my predicament perfectly. He whispered "I think these night classes rather keep him from the pub."

We never talked of it beyond that, and I suppose I may have imagined his understanding, but it made me feel warmly toward him from then on. We walked together to the tube station and waited on the platform. Owen for a train via Bank, for he lived somewhere near Islington, and me for one via Charing Cross, for I needed to change at Waterloo. This became our routine for as long as we both attended the course. We must have been regular in our habits too because every night we arrived to find a ten minute wait for Owen's train, which always arrived empty of passengers, no doubt fresh from the depot, and then mine only a minute behind it.

Owen's octagonal table, he told me, had been gifted to him by his grandmother when he first moved away from home. It was apparently something of an heirloom although he never learned from where. It had been painted a very seventies shade of orange, and possibly had been whitewashed before that. In its time under his protection it had acquired some knocks, a bit of a wobble, and an overlapping mosaic of coffee rings. Recently the paint had begun to peel after a few years in the corner of a damp garage. He had been on the verge of throwing it out before noticing that, beneath the paint, the legs were really rather well made and were, he suspected, walnut.

He had worked the first week on the underside until he was sure he had the technique of removing the paint without damaging the wood. The second week he went to work on the top with a heat gun and plastic scraper, and had it all but paint free within an hour.

"Oh!" he exclaimed when he stepped back to admire his work. "That's a bit..."

The instructor, a thin, grey-bearded man, possessed of the creased face and leathery hands of a true artisan, came over and looked. He sucked on his biro in way which suggested, along with a certain something in the air whenever he drew near, that it was a poor surrogate for a pipe, and said "Yes, it is a bit."

Beneath the paint was what looked like an oak octagon seated inside a two-inch wide walnut rim. The oak had been inlaid with a broad crucifix in some white wood, and, in the same white wood, above it were the words "And I will cut off witchcrafts," and below it "out of thine hand."

"It's not..." another student said.

"It's not very good," the instructor said. "The lettering's poor and the cross is far too blockish. It doesn't fit the shape. There's no..." he gesticulated with his pen. "...artistry."

Owen nodded sadly. "I can see why it was painted over."

"It's old," the instructor said, bending down to peer at it closely. "Nineteenth century I'd say. It's a shame because the legs really are fine but this is just... amateurish folk art. Hold on!" He dug his thumbnail underneath a raised flap of paint on the edge of the tabletop and pulled a great thick scab of it away. "There's carving around the edge that's been filled in with paint." A little more thumbnail scraping and the instructor exposed an O carved into the side of the table.

Owen set to work with his heat gun and started to lift the paint from around the edge. Over the course of the rest of the evening he announced each letter out to the class as he uncovered them. O then M then, a long section of scrollwork with a sort of thorny, woodland flavour, and then the word PARQUIN and the letters D and O.

"Parquin doom," said the instructor. "Mean anything to you?"

"The family name is Parkin," Owen said, "but supposedly we're of French origin so I guess it could be an anglicisation of Parquin. My uncle Lawrence is keen on family history. I'll ask him."

The following week Owen brought in a printed out email which he pronounced an excellent example of correspondence with his uncle.

---

So you have the Parquin Doom. Well done!

The story, such as I know it, is in the family history L'Histoire des Parquin (the title is an affectation, the book is in English) which was published by one of the Devon Parkins back in 1930 (your mother and I met the Devon Parkins at a wedding once – nice bunch but a worrying tendency toward becoming Liberal Democrat councillors). My copy is a rather beloved heirloom I'm afraid but my grandson Felix (your first cousin once removed Felix) apparently wants to digitise it so if he does I will be sure to get you a copy. Failing that they occasionally turn up at specialist book dealers and go for only a little more than their very niche interest would suggest.

The history is chiefly concerned with the financial ups and downs of the family (sadly as many downs as ups – no great inheritance awaits either of us) but it does mention the Doom. Background is that Claude Parquin, of some minor French noble descent but no great shakes, after a rather undistinguished military career made the mistake of joining the young Napoleon III in one of his early misguided attempts to seize the French throne and, if not actually exiled, decided wisdom lay in removing himself to Buckinghamshire. There he proceeded to acquire an estate by forging the Will of a local landowner named Ormerod. Ormerod's nephew challenged the Will in court but lost.

(The magistrate in this case then purchases a plum lump of the estate, paid for by a loan from the estate, for which no repayments or interest ever appear in the accounts and which is written off as a bad debt three years later. Make of that what you will!)

Nephew Ormerod, in a fit of despair, his great expectations come to nought, then proceeds to kill his wife, five children, and himself. The history rather glosses over this unedifying episode but the murders were grisly enough to be of local interest and professor Google will tell you all you want to know. Apparently he smothered his family one by one as they slept and then stabbed himself in the kidney. The children aged from two to thirteen. Imagine! There is also a rather mawkish contemporary ballad Five Angels Small which I do not recommend.

Anyway, years pass and Claude is succeeded by his eldest son Charles who was a dab hand at business and makes piles of the right stuff, buys yet more land, and has a great house built called Oaklake (now torn down and replaced by an unlovely housing estate. Do not visit! Cousin Tom (also your first cousin once removed - but removed in the opposite direction) did and obtained a colour slide photo of part of the original boundary wall but lost the eight-track player from his Citron CX).

Charles lives to a ripe old age and dies peacefully and wealthily in his bed and all goes to his eldest son Bartholomew, now in his late fifties. Bartholomew is a very different sort of fish - has converted to Methodism and seems to have spent most of his previous life writing impenetrable essays on biblical apocrypha. Upon inheriting, Bartholomew somehow learns the dirty truth of where the money comes from and, finding no surviving Ormerods to recompense, proceeds to give away the fortune to good causes. The family quickly step in and have him declared insane and take over the estate themselves (and squander it only slightly slower). Old Bartholomew lives out his days in Oaklake apparently, and I quote "carving a table he called the Parquin Doom."

And that is it. No further mention is made of the Doom and family historians (there have been a few of us) have been unable to locate it in the various Wills, inventories, and whathaveyous.

So well done again. Do send me a picture when you have completed your restoration.

Love,

Uncle Larry

---

While I read this, and Owen worked on stripping the paint from one of the legs, the instructor studied the table sucking air through his pen with every breath. Eventually he proclaimed "I do not think the top is original."

The entire class gathered around of course.

"That leg you're doing is walnut," he said. "And so is the outside of the top. So why make the inner part from oak? I think it was added later."

"So what's underneath it?" someone asked.

"The original carved top I'll wager. Recessed below the level of the rim."

Owen stood up. "Will it come off?" he asked.

"One way or another," the instructor said. "It's old so it's probably in with hide glue but it's in tight. To be honest I don't think you'll get it off without damaging it pretty badly."

Owen looked at the top. "What do I do?"

"Very carefully chisel a bit off at a corner till you hit walnut, then get some hot water and a stiff brush in there and see if you can loosen it. If you can, chase it out."

"Okay," said Owen, and went and got a chisel.

He did not get the top off that week and we walked to the tube as normal and waited for our respective trains, his arriving first and empty as always.

"Funny things, families," he said while we stood on the platform. "My mother always said there was no Parkin she disliked, but she did not like the Parkins."

I told him some story of how, thirty-eight years after it had happened, my own parents' divorce was still causing issues at weddings.

"You're tied to them though aren't you," he said, the wind through the tunnel that heralded his train just starting to rise. "I don't mean out of a sense of duty or anything, but because you are them. You might excommunicate yourself but you can't change your blood."

The following week he got the top off. It took him just twenty minutes. The false top had only been glued in around the edge, and once he had destroyed that all the way around the thing just lifted away. He did it entirely without ceremony and, for a moment, I was the only other person in the workshop to notice.

Underneath was a dark red walnut carving. On one side of the octagon, his feet toward the outer edge of the table, walked a skeletal figure, his grinning skull-like face a raised boss in the centre of the table. In one hand he held a dagger and in the other, pinched between thumb and forefinger, was a chain. Shackled to the chain behind him were three unhappy people, two men and a woman, all naked and following on behind. These figures were only half the size of the skeleton so that each only occupied one side of the octagon. On the four remaining unoccupied sides was, in far shallower relief, a simple winter forest scene, the branches of distant bare trees overlapping, echoing the scrollwork around the side.

"What a curious composition," the instructor said from behind my shoulder. "A sort of faux-medieval style but rather well done. I wonder if there was originally meant to be an angel leading the happy chosen to heaven on the other side."

I had epoxy mixed up to fill the chips and dents in my banister and had to get back to it before it started to set, but the rest of the class filed by the table to take a look. It was Quite A Thing, seemed to be the general consensus. As I made a hash of my chips and dents and scraped them out and redid them, I did not pay a lot of attention to Owen. Only later did it occur to me that he was remarkably quiet for the rest of the evening.

We talked on the walk to the tube though, and I reiterated that his table was quite a thing.

"I don't know how I feel about it," he said. "It's almost like a direct threat against me and my girls."

"Your not even a Parkin, let alone a Parquin," I said.

"Family is blood though, remember. Can I tell you something?"

"Of course."

"There is something that runs in the family. A history of mental illness as they put it on the forms. My great uncle, who we were close to, hanged himself and I always felt... well I always felt I understood why. I talked to my grandmother about it once and she felt the same way – she actually told me she was jealous of him at the time. I think my mother had it and that's what drove her to drink. I suspect it's what's making my eldest so wild."

I was stuck for what the right thing was to say. I asked if he had ever seen anyone about it, a therapist or someone. He ignored me.

"When I took that false top off, I swear I saw the skull turn toward me."

"A trick of the light."

"No doubt," he said. "No doubt."

For a minute I thought I might mention my own decision to stop drinking but, before I could, he asked about something else and the conversation moved on. In any case, we were too near the station and going our separate ways for me to broach a topic like that. 

We stood toward the centre of the platform and, as his train via Bank slowed, we could see it was, once again, empty. When it moved away however, I saw, at the very back of the train, one other passenger. He must have ridden to the depot and back again, I thought, and that was all I thought. By the next week I had quite forgotten about him.

But when we went home that week there he was again, still right at the back of the train so that it had picked up speed before he passed me and I did not see him well. I mentioned this to Owen the week after only because we had remarked before at our curious consistency in catching the same trains and it amused me that someone else was equally predictable. Owen did not say anything in reply. In retrospect he spoke very little at all those last few weeks.

At the station though, he asked me if I might move back down the platform and get a better look at the man. "I have had a very foolish worry," he said. "And you would set my mind at ease."

I did this, bidding him goodbye as the train approached. I did not reach the very end of the platform before it started moving again but I was far back enough that it was only moving slowly when it passed me. There again was the man, only this time he had turned in his seat to look at me and was holding something up in his hand as if to show me. They were manacles. And his face... well he had no face. Just a skull. A dark red walnut coloured skull.

What could I do? I ran and shouted to Owen but that was hopeless, and I waved my arms thinking that someone might be watching on CCTV and would come running to see what was wrong but no-one did. And then my own train turned up a minute later, and I dashed in and out of the doors and back down the platform, unable to decide whether to get in or not, but in the end the alarm sounded and I jumped on board and there was nothing I could do but stand there, rattling down the tunnel and looking up and down the carriage, trying to convince myself I had imagined it. By the time I got home I had almost succeeded.

When I went to the class the following week I already suspected that the man who had been stabbed on the Northern line was Owen. When he failed to show up I was certain. I did not say anything. I just stood there next to his empty bench the entire evening and made such a hash of my banister that it was unrecoverable and the instructor provided me with another. By the week after, the last week which I attended, his name had been released and we all knew. Toward the end of the evening the instructor quietly asked if he could show me something.

I followed him to the storeroom where he lifted Owen's table down from a rack and placed it between us. There was the skeleton, grinning as always, and there behind it were now four unhappy people, the last looking pitifully over his shoulder, as if he expected some kind of rescue.

"What will you do with it?" I asked.

"If his next of kin come asking," the instructor said. "I'll have no choice but to return it. But between now and then, I think I shall restore the false top."