The Last Train to Scarborough (24 page)

'I
know you won't mind me interrupting, Jim,' he said.

'It
could have been worse,' I said, craning about.

'Old
Fielding,' he said, as I left off pissing and pulled the chain.'... Guess where
he was in the three months before he came here?'

The
flushing of the toilet was so loud (it was as if the thing was throwing down
half the German Sea) that I couldn't hear what came next, and had to ask
Vaughan to speak up.

'York
gaol!' he repeated, over the dinning of the waters.

With
gun in hand, I began to turn about, but stopped to watch the kid. He had backed
away from me, and his right hand rested on the gunwale. Behind him, on the
other ship, the man who had raised his arm had lowered it, and he had turned a
different way, looking for another bit of good to do; his vessel was also
bouncing and swinging away from us, taking him on to the next business.

The
kid, leaning against the gunwale, turned from me to the departing ship. But I
ought not to be bothering about him. I had a decision to make. I could go
for'ard with the gun or I could go aft. At present, I was looking aft. I could
see clear past the bridge house to the wake our ship was making. I ought first
to make for the engine room, stop the blokes who were creating that wake. They
were party to a crime as long as they continued their work. I pictured them as
small, half deafened and blinded, blackened blokes who never questioned the
ringing bells that brought their commands. I would go to the bridge, and work
the lever that told them to change direction. Suddenly a great wind came, and
the fore-deck behind me went low and the bridge house tilted towards me, as
though its illuminated windows were eyes, inspecting me. The ship righted
itself, and there came the sound of hammering - a hammering on iron. I turned
fully about, facing away from the kid, and I was instantly felled by a giant,
flying sailor.

The
gun flew from my hand as I collapsed to the deck. The ship made another slow
rise as our struggle began. There were not at first any blows; at least, I did
not think so at the time. It was more like a kind of wrestling, in which I was
ever closer smothered by the sailor's great weight and his wide oilskin. I was
under him, and his stinking breath, and then for an instant I was up, seeing
the sea from the wrong angle as the ship pitched again - and catching a glimpse
of the gunwale, where the kid had been standing, and was no longer. In that
moment of distraction, the sailor had caught hold of my ears, one in each hand.
They made convenient handles for him as he contemplated me. His great face was
in two halves: black beard and the rest - and the rest was mainly nose.
You are ugly,
I thought, and perhaps he meant to say the same to
me. He got as far as 'You' before rage over-took his speech, and he dashed my
head down onto the iron deck.

The
next time I lifted my head, I lay in the iron parlour again, my only companion
the mighty slumbering anchor chain. The ship rose and fell, and I slipped in
and out of dim dreams. Presently I looked down at my right hand, which lay like
a thing defeated. No gun there.

I
had been on the deck, and removed in one dark instant from it. The same had
happened to the kid, only I was sure he'd gone overboard in hopes of reaching
the second ship. Why had he given over the gun? Because he knew he was in
queer, and didn't want any part of what was going on or was
about
to go on.

I
fancied, over the next long while, that I occasionally heard the ringing of a
bell but it was nothing more than a faint tinkling through the iron walls, and
I could not keep count of the strokes. My pillow was a link of the anchor
chain, and it served as well as goose feathers. My trouble was the cold, and I
would ward it off by ordering myself to sleep which I seemed able to do at
will. They hadn't drugged my coffee on my first trip to the chart room, I had
decided. Instead, I had picked up a sleeping sickness as a result of whatever
had happened at Paradise.

The
house came and went in my dreams along with all the old familiars: the
red-shaded oil lamp, the over-heated blue room, the roaring white gas, the
magician with his kettle, the long needle. In addition, a man with puffed-up
feet scrambled about on the bathroom floor for blood tonic, and the poor fellow
was cutting himself to ribbons in the process, being quite desperate. A voice
spoke in my head, a smooth character sent to explain my own thoughts to me
said, 'You see, Jim, he was the last man left in Scarborough.'

Nobody
walked the Prom; the lighthouse was dark; the two carriages of the funicular
railway stood dangling out of reach, neither up nor down; each of the three
hundred and sixty-five rooms of the Grand Hotel - one for every day of the year
- stood empty, and drifting black smoke had possession of the town. The sea had
come all the way up to the railway station. It was exploring the excursion
platforms and the engine shed beyond. I saw the wax doll in the lavender room,
the blue flame of the paraffin heater, and a paper fan that, when folded out,
revealed a painting of a sea-side town that was not Scarborough but showed
Scarborough
up,
put it to shame, this one being sunlit, with handsome people
walking along a pretty promenade, and a light blue sea beyond.

All
at once I was there, with my own wife and my new wife, who chatted away
merrily, which I knew to be wrong, and which did cause me anxiety, but I put it
from my mind for I was away from Scarborough in an altogether better sea-side
spot, at least for a while. Scarborough waited for me, however, and I knew I
would have to go back there, to examine the disaster that had befallen the
place and to account for it and to answer for it.

Walking
down the stairs towards the comfortable landing with my boots in my hand, I
revolved the words of Theo Vaughan. Were they true? He must know that I could
hardly check by asking Fielding himself.

He
had, according to Vaughan, been lagged for raising funds for a publishing
company that didn't exist. It went down as fraud. It hadn't been such a great
amount of money, and it had all been repaid so he'd only got three months.
Vaughan had once had the newspaper clipping that told the whole tale, but he'd
lost it (which went a little way to his credit, I thought, since it seemed to
mean he didn't have a plan to use the information, but would just blurt it out
as the fancy took him).

The
prison sentence explained Fielding's presence in Paradise, according to
Vaughan. He'd always been keen on the sea, and had come to Scarborough to catch
his breath after the shock. He found the house to his liking, if a little low
class, and had taken it in hand; set himself to raising the tone with fancy
recipes, a few sea paintings here and there, cigars in the ship room, sherry in
the evenings. He'd put some money into the house too, and was largely paying the
cost of the redecoration of the second floor, for the prosecution had not
finished him financially speaking.

I
approached the kitchen, and the door was on the jar, letting me see the long
table. All the items upon it were a bit better ordered now, and stood in a row:
knife polisher, big tea pot, vegetable boiler, corkscrew, toast rack, two dish
covers. The kitchen had been cleaned, and the supper things put away. Adam
Rickerby had done it, I knew. He liked things orderly. That youth now sat at
one end of the table, applying Melton's Cream to a pair of women's boots - his
sister's evidently - and she was reading to him from a newspaper with a glass
of red wine at her elbow. She was certainly a little gone with drink, but she
spoke very properly.

'Interview
with foreign secretary,' she read, and took a sip of the wine. 'Sir Edward Grey
had an interview with Mr Asquith at 10 Downing Street this morning ...'

'Where?
'
her brother asked, quite
sharply, as though the matter was of particular importance to him.

'10
Downing Street,' his sister repeated, before carrying on reading. 'The
interview was unusually prolonged. Sir Edward Grey remained at 10 Downing
Street for just over an hour and a half.'

She
turned the page of the paper, and Adam Rickerby sat back and thought about what
he'd heard for a moment. He then took up a brush, and began polishing the boot,
saying, 'Any railway smashes?'

'No,'
his sister replied very firmly.

'Runaway
trams?' he enquired, with spittle flying.

'Nothing
of that kind,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'How lovely to see our Mr Stringer,' she
ran on, looking up at me. But as I walked over to her brother and handed him my
boots, she turned two pages of the paper in silence.

I
heard soft footsteps behind me. They belonged to Fielding, who was approaching
in dressing gown and slippers with his own boots in his hand.

'Have
you been to Eastbourne, Mr Stringer?' Miss Rickerby asked, looking up from her
paper as I gave my boots to the boy.

'Eastbourne
in Sussex?' I enquired.

'Well,
I don't think there's another.'

'Is
there something about it in the paper?'

'Are
you avoiding my question?' she asked. She smiled, but looked tired.

'I've
never been there,' I said. 'I just wondered why you mentioned it.'

Fielding,
having given his boots to the boy, was lifting the kettle that sat on the
range, pouring boiling water into a cup and stirring.

'Ovaltine,'
he said, seeing me looking on. 'Would you care for a cup, Mr Stringer?'

'Oh,
no thanks.'

The
stuff was meant to bring on sleep, and Fielding must have made it every night,
for Miss Rickerby paid him no mind as he went about it. She said, 'Eastbourne
is the one place I prefer to Scarborough, Mr Stringer.'

'Well,
I wouldn't know,' I said, and then I thought of something clever to add: 'But
this is Paradise. How can there be any advance on that?'

'Oh,
I should think there could be,' she said. 'Probably quite easily.'

Adam
Rickerby was polishing Fielding's boots, going at them like billy-o.

'Don't
denigrate the house, Miss R,' said Fielding, with the cup in his hand.
'Eastbourne
is
fine though.'

'Told
you,' Amanda Rickerby said, addressing me.

'Debussy
wrote
La Mer
at the Grand Hotel there,' said Fielding, and since he was
addressing me particularly I nodded back, in a vague sort of way. 'Then again
it's a shingle beach and you can't sit on it... Good night all, and batten down
the hatches. We're in for a storm, I believe. You should take a look at the
size of the waves getting up just now, Mr Stringer.'

He
quit the room, and I too made towards the door when Amanda Rickerby spoke.

'It's
late, Mr Stringer,' she said, looking sadly down at her wine glass. 'I believe
that Sunday has already gone.' And then, in a glorious moment, she raised her
eyes to mine: 'Have you had your treat yet?'

'I
had a bottle of beer in Mr Vaughan's room. Does that count?'

'I'm
not at all sure that it does.'

'Have
you had yours?'

'No.'

'Well
then,' I said, 'that makes two of us.'

I
glanced over at Adam Rickerby, who'd finished my first boot. What he made of
this exchange between a near-stranger and his sister I could hardly imagine. He
was polishing hard.

'I'm
obliged to you for doing that,' I called across to him.

'I'll
bring 'em up in t'morning,' he said, not looking up.

I
walked through the doorway, and Amanda Rickerby rose from her seat and
followed. She wasn't done with me yet, and I knew I was red in the face.

'When
you go to bed, Mr Stringer...'

'Yes?'
I said.

'Oh
... nothing.'

She
wore an expression that I could not understand.

'Why
does your brother want to know about railway smashes?' I whispered, after a
space.

'Oh
just... morbid interest.'

'I
could tell him a few tales,' I said.

'You've
caused a few smashes yourself, I dare say,' she said, looking up at me and
shaking her hair out of her eyes.

'In
a roundabout way,' I said.

'You
hardly know whether to claim credit for them or not.'

I
was for some reason lifting my hand, which might have gone anywhere and done anything
at that moment; might have stroked her amazing hair or pressed down on her
bosom. But in the end it landed on my collar, and gave a tug for no good reason
apart from the fact that the whole house was overheated.

'Any
road ...' I began, and I heard the wife's voice, saying, 'Don't say that, Jim,
it doesn't mean anything.'

'Will
you be staying with us tomorrow night?' asked Amanda Rickerby.

'Depends
on the engine,' I said. 'But it might come to that.'