The Baghdad Railway Club (21 page)

That was a relief, but not to any great degree. Everything was out of my hands, and I wanted to go to beyond Samarrah, where everything was out of
everyone’s
hands, and we would all be on an equal footing. There, Shepherd would confront Findlay, and the truth would finally emerge.

Shepherd and Findlay walked into the station shack. At the far end of the platform, Captain Bob Ferry was talking to some Royal Engineers. Presently, they left him on his own, looking at the radio cars. I called to him: ‘Are we setting those down here?’ There was a siding all ready and waiting for them.

Ferry turned and contemplated me. ‘We’re . . . not,’ he said.

‘You’re staying with us then?’

‘. . . Yes,’ he said at length.

I had been rather hoping we would get rid of him.

We had made camp perhaps ten miles beyond the spot at which Stevens, Shepherd and I had come under attack. Viewing the desert glare from the carriage, I believe I had identified the remains of the fire we had lit, but of our single-fly tent and folding chairs there had been no sign. They must have been taken as booty by the Arabs. We had stopped a little while before passing that place – near the siding that held the motor launches. Shepherd and some of the Royal Engineers had walked to the wagons and looked them over for a second time, and once again no move was made to couple them up. I had been travelling in the carriage, feeling . . . what was the word? A sort of continuous
oscillation
.

Our camp was at a ring of palms. They ought to have enclosed a beautiful lagoon. In fact, only our campfire burned in the middle of them, with cooking things and water bottles nearby – also canvas chairs and King’s crate of champagne which, since it had practically boiled and was undrinkable, he had made generally available. We had chosen a spot near a feature of interest, namely some sand-coloured rocks, and the Royal Engineers had been walking about on them as if they’d never seen rocks before. They all had on keffiyahs, rather fancying themselves in them, and Wallace King and his assistant had been filming and photographing them. King had kept shouting to the man on the topmost rock: ‘Scan the horizon!’ but the fellow couldn’t do it for laughing. King had explained, ‘This footage is to be preceded by a placard reading, “A forward patrol reconnoitres”,’ at which one of the Engineers had shouted back, ‘Why not change the bally placard? “A forward patrol larks about on some rocks.”’ That hadn’t gone down well.

As for Shepherd: he and a couple of spare Engineers had walked a quarter mile along the line in order to inspect a second branch going off at a wide angle. The branch had been in a bad state; had apparently petered out in the desert, but three further Turkish wagons had been berthed upon it, and these held wooden crates that had contained, strange to say, an aeroplane, or parts thereof. It was not thought possible to run
The Elephant
along the branch in order to collect this booty. I had viewed the wagons myself, through binoculars borrowed by the campfire.

After his return from that jaunt, Shepherd had got hold of a rifle and shot a gazelle, parts of which were now roasting on the stones in the fire. The fat would spurt from the meat – it was very fatty – with red sparks. Otherwise the flames were invisible in the white light.

Watching Shepherd slay the beautiful animal, I was reminded that he must still be a suspect in the case of the murdered Captain Boyd. His explanation of the Turkish ‘treasure’ might have held water (I was inclined to think so), but that didn’t mean he hadn’t become aware that Boyd thought him a traitor.

Now, at the end of his exertions, Shepherd was taking a shower bath on the other side of
The Elephant
, which had been kept in steam as before. A Royal Engineer and one of the privates stood on top of the tender. They’d removed the cap off the water-filler hole, and were lowering into it at regular intervals a bucket on a rope. This they would then upend on to the man below. It was a service open to all comers.

Major Findlay, looking one degree redder than he had that morning, sat opposite me, on the other side of the fire, looking at a back number of
The Times
. I read, ‘New British Thrust East of the Vimy Ridge’. Turning the page, he caught my eye. There was nothing for it: he would have to speak to me.

‘You feeling better?’

‘A little.’

‘I was sorry to hear about your man – Jarvis, wasn’t it?’

I nodded, gave a mumbled ‘Sir.’

‘He was demoralised by the heat, no doubt . . . Or was it the attack? I suppose he’d never been under fire before.’

I felt the need to defend Jarvis. ‘He
had
been, sir. At Kut-al-Amara.’

Shepherd was approaching, fresh from his shower bath, hair combed back. He might have been stepping into the cocktail lounge of the Midland Grand Hotel, except that he wore his gun.

‘Were you there, sir?’ I asked Findlay.

‘Where?’

‘Kut.’

He shook his head. ‘Came up straight from Basrah. I’ve never eaten antelope before,’ he went on, looking at the spluttering meat. ‘I’m looking forward to it. Well, I think I am.’

Shepherd took hold of one of the folding seats. He’d caught the drift of our earlier conversation, and he wouldn’t let Findlay change the course of it, for he asked, ‘Did you happen to see Jarvis after the meeting broke up?’

‘Did I see
Jarvis
?’ said Findlay. ‘I was attempting to protect the lady. Not that she takes kindly to any sort of chivalrous display,’ he added, with great regret.

I spent the next little while revolving this answer, as no doubt did Shepherd. Findlay
must
have seen Jarvis, since Jarvis had taken the photograph from the club room and then we’d found it in Findlay’s pocket.

Shepherd offered a cigarette to Findlay, who took it, and began to smoke it rather crossly, it seemed to me. I had not seen him smoke before; I myself could not face a cigarette.

I looked up and saw a van speeding across the horizon. To my somewhat dazed mind it seemed to be towing behind it – sideways on – a gigantic cone. But it was only the sand that the wheels threw up. Captain Ferry was in that motor, I knew, together with a driver we’d picked up at Samarrah. It was one of the two radio vans. The other was also flying about in the vicinity. Sometimes the two would converge, and there would be a conference; then they’d roar off in opposite directions and attempt a wireless communication.

Findlay was now pacing near the rocks, while Shepherd was turning over the antelope steaks. It would soon be supper time, and all the party seemed to know it. At any rate, the Royal Engineers were converging on the fire, and I now saw that the two radio cars were racing towards us, dragging half the desert with them. They gave us a wide berth, so as to spare us the dust cloud, and came to a stop near
The Elephant
, where the four men climbed out. As the dust around them subsided, it was Captain Bob Ferry that I had my eye on. He went behind the engine, whereas the other three stayed by the vans. Since a stalemate seemed to have set in between Shepherd and Findlay, and since I didn’t feel like eating, I walked somewhat unsteadily towards
The Elephant
. I knew that telegraphy was somehow important in the case of Captain Boyd, and I meant to draw Ferry out about who had sent what to whom.

One fellow remained standing on the water tank of the tender, and as I walked around the rear of it, I saw Ferry standing naked. He looked if anything neater without clothes than he did with, and when the bucket of fairly cold and fairly clean water was pitched down on him, he looked neater still, for all the black hairs on his long brown body were immediately aligned by it. He’d got hold of a cake of soap, and he was lathering his bald brown head. I registered the gold signet ring on his left little finger, and I saw, nestling amid his chest hairs, another item of jewellery: a small gold crucifix on a thin gold chain.

The Royal Engineer called down to Ferry: ‘Ready for your second?’

Ferry glanced upwards, and in doing so, he saw me: ‘I . . . am,’ he said.

The water came down, and all the hairs were straight again. Ferry had closed his eyes to take the deluge. He opened them again to see me still staring at him. He must think me a queer, but I didn’t care. What had Captain Boyd’s Arab servant, the amiable but half-witted Farhan, said? That the British soldier who’d visited Boyd on the day before his last day had had ‘religion in his heart’ – the Christian religion. Farhan had also disclosed that Boyd had made frequent visits to ‘the home of the British’ – surely the British Residency. Surely, also, he had gone there to send telegrams.

Ferry stepped forward to where his uniform was neatly folded on top of his kit bag together with Colt revolver, belt and holster.

I had seen the carbon copy, albeit too faint to read, of one of Boyd’s messages, or one of his attempted messages. A line had been put through it. Was it that Ferry had refused to send it? Was it that the message constituted what Ferry had called ‘tittle-tattle’? Or did he have some deeper reason for disapproving? Ferry was religious. He had the crucifix, and was therefore most likely Catholic. If you were Church of England, you didn’t go in for jewellery. Not if you were a man, anyhow. He had been first to arrive at both the club meetings I’d attended, and the Church of the Saviour’s Mother was just around the corner from the clubhouse. Catholics – keen ones – would go to a service held on a Saturday evening as well as the Sunday ones. They went on a Saturday evening because it was
nearly
Sunday.

Ferry put on his shorts first, and no wonder, the way I was looking at him. He said, ‘Are you . . . ?’

He buckled up his gun next, and I could see the logic of that, too, given that I still stared.

‘Am I what?’ I said.

Ferry put on his shirt. As he sat down ready to put on his socks, puttees and boots, he leant forwards and I could easily see the crucifix between the buttons of his shirt. It would be in plain sight every time he leant over. It was a wonder I hadn’t noticed it before. The point was that he wouldn’t have had to strip off for Ahmad to notice it.

‘The peculiar . . . code you employ,’ he said, and the rest came with horrific fluency: ‘Are you working for Manners at the War Office?’

He was lacing the first of his boots. It seemed to me he’d set himself the task of doing it in not more than half a dozen precise movements. It made me feel sick to watch him, for I knew I was not up to that sort of effort.

Ferry said, ‘Are you . . .’

Sock, boot, puttee. Ferry had completed his left leg; he now turned his attention to the right one. He was horribly in control of himself. He began by making an inspection of his long left foot, pulling apart the toes. Beyond the smoke box of
The Elephant
, the sun was going down, but not without protest, not without having started a great many other fires in the sky around it. I wanted to say to Ferry, ‘You had a run-in with Boyd. What happened?’ But I was too hot to speak, so Ferry did instead:

‘Are you . . . on a secret job?’

It was the cool cheek of the question that I found distressing. Ferry was not turning out how I expected. But this was my fault, for I had seen the steeliness in him.

Fifty yards off, Wallace King and Wilson were filming the sunset. King was a little way in advance of Wilson, perhaps taking a closer look at the sunset. ‘It’s not up to much!’ I could hear him calling. ‘We’ve got plenty of sunsets anyway! What we need is a good sunrise!’

It made no difference of course, the going down of the sun, and I thought of the one day of my childhood when I’d been overwhelmed by the heat. Baytown, the place of my birth, stood on the Yorkshire coast, not too far from Jarvis’s Scarborough. It wasn’t easy to be overwhelmed by heat on the Yorkshire coast. Knocked over by the east wind, yes. I was six years old or so; the sun was raying down on the beach, and I was screaming. My father held my hand. Being only a man – a widower – he did not quite understand young children, and I believe my distress had been increased by the woman who had come up and shouted at him, ordering him to take me indoors. He had immediately removed me into the lifeboat house, which was always dark, and smelt of paint, for they were always painting the lifeboat. There was a bench you could sit on to watch them do it. I had been placed on the bench and given a penny lick . . .

Ferry was asking another question: ‘Are you quite . . .’

An expression came to me all the way from Yorkshire, and I believed that I said out loud, ‘I feel like I don’t know what.’

And then I keeled over, and I continued to watch the sunset from sideways on.

They – I didn’t know exactly who – put me back on the sofa in the carriage. I was given bottled water, more quinine; I dropped asleep.

I awoke to see Findlay descending from the carriage. I had been somehow aware of him not sleeping, fretting with
The Times
– thrashing at it. He would now, I supposed, be making for the camp around the fire in the palms. As he opened the door, I made out the red glow rising above the single-fly tents. Shepherd was over there. It was no cooler in the open but uncomfortable in a different way, preferable to some. I took it for granted that the military arrangements had been made to guard us – that a couple of men were on sentry go, that someone was keeping the steam up in
The Elephant
. I could not see Ferry in the carriage, but an hour later, when I next awoke, he was there, and he was there perhaps six more times as I came out of fitful dozes, always with his pipe in his mouth and his eyes upon me. Evidently, he lived without sleep. Maybe that was the way of it with the brainier sorts of fellows. He was an Oxford man. He taught there, as did Harriet Bailey’s husband. He was Professor Bailey. Perhaps Prof. Bailey and Ferry were more than colleagues. Perhaps they were fast friends, in which case Ferry would have another reason – on top of his own strict morality – to warn Boyd off The Lady. I thought of the message I’d seen in the telegraphic office at the Residency: ‘Religion has a great influence over the Arab.’ Well, it had a great influence over some white men, too.