The Last Train to Scarborough (3 page)

'We're
just off actually, Mr Henderson,' I said.

He
tipped his derby hat at me, but continued to address the wife: 'I do believe
you are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country, Mrs Stringer.'

And
then of course he'd given a grin.

'You
are a symptom of the malaise afflicting the country,' I said to Lydia as we
walked on down the dusty road, in the light rain, making for the boot maker and
mender's with the lamps overdue for lighting but old man Shannon nowhere in
sight. 'What do you make of that?'

'I'm
rather flattered,' she said, as we turned in at the gate of the boot maker's
long front yard.

'Yes,'
I said, 'I could see. You coloured up.'

'I
certainly did not,' she said.

But
she had done, and the colour was up in her face still as she lay on the sofa in
our new front parlour, in the new (and also very old) house a little way
outside the village, the house that had been practically given us by that same
Robert Henderson: seven shillings a week for a place three times the size of
our earlier one, and with a contract giving us the option to buy at some
equally favourable rate.

It
was nine o'clock, as I knew by my watch rather than by the clock of St Andrew's
church, which did not now reach us, we being so far out.

'I
mentioned the business about the Venus to Peter in the Fortune earlier on,' I
said.

'Oh
yes?' said the wife, who was not in the least interested in the sayings and
doings of Peter Backhouse, who was the verger of St Andrew's, even though she
counted his wife, Lillian, amongst her best friends.

'He
said, "Somebody did
what,
you say? To the Rokeby
what?"'

The
wife sighed.

'And
to think it was done for publicity,' she said.

She
sat back down. The law books were on the tab rug between us.

'I
don't know about all this business,' I said, indicating them. 'All I wanted was
to be an engine man, and when that came to nothing, I settled for being a
railway copper.'

'Don't
fib, Jim,' said the wife, and we listened to the ticking of the clock, the
ticking of the fire, and then the mooing of a cow, of which we heard a good
deal in our new house, along with wood pigeons.

We
were more thrown together, living so far out, and that was good
and
bad. The wife's aim was to set us up with our own little
empire, and her work for the women's cause was starting to take second place to
that, although she would never have admitted it. She'd gone all out for the
country life, stealing a march on me, for I was the Yorkshireman. I was the
one who'd taken her north, having struck that bad business while apprenticed
for the footplate with the London and South Western Railway. For me, life in
the North Eastern Railway police was next best thing to life on the footplate.
I'd been promoted detective sergeant in double quick time, and I now made fair
wages. But the wife wanted to make me a sort of gentleman
farmer-cum-solicitor, and her pushing had earned its reward. I was on the point
of giving in my notice, with a view to starting as articled clerk in the
offices of Parker and Wilkinson, an arrangement subject to my performing satisfactorily
during what was billed as a 'conversation' with Mr Parker himself about railway
law. His outfit was one of several firms that did work for the North Eastern,
and their particular speciality was cases of personal injury: the paying off -
or, better yet, fending off - of passengers' claims for damages.

I
knew very well that this conversation was to be a test, albeit of a gentlemanly
sort, and it was now less than twelve hours off. Going into the office of
Parker and Wilkinson would entail at first a cut in my earnings, but the wife
had told me to see this as taking a step back in order to make a great leap,
and she was prepared to dip into the inheritance she'd had from her father in
order to help fund my training for the law.

'Shall
we have another look at Buckingham?' she enquired.

'Go
on then,' I said, and she picked up the book.

'The
train he's waiting for is running late,' said the wife, after an interval of
reading lying down with her head propped in her hand. 'He takes a carriage
instead, and then sends the bill to the railway company. Will they settle?'

'They'd
be better off just paying him not to use the railway,' I said. 'They should pay
him to leave the bloody
country.'

The
wife eyed me.

'It
depends on the lateness of the train,' I said. 'If it's only running half an
hour late, that would be a reasonable delay. A day late would be unreasonable.
Anything in-between, you argue about.'

The
wife yawned as she said, 'That's about right, Jim. I'm sure you'll do
brilliantly tomorrow.'

'Are
you?'

'It's
really nothing to worry about. Mr Parker said it would be a formality.'

'That's
just what bothers me.'

She
came across and sat on my sofa, lifting her skirts as she stepped up, like a
tomboy climbing a hill.

'You'll
have a lovely day of it tomorrow,' she said. 'Your meeting with Mr Parker will
be over in no time, and when it's done, you'll be on the road to being a
solicitor ... I know you've the whole day off, but you might call into the
police office to let them know how you get on.'

'To
put on swank, you mean?'

'...
You'll perhaps take a turn in
the Museum Gardens, then perhaps go to Brown's to see how your new suit's
coming on.'

Owing
to the slowness of Brown the tailor my new suit would not be ready in time for the
interview, and I would be making do with my
best
suit.

'I
think I'll sit by the river and watch the trains going over the Scarborough
railway bridge. They've the new Z Class on the Scarborough branch. They're just
running her in, you know.'

'What
are you, Jim? Ten years old?'

'I'm
pushing thirty, which is too late to be starting a new job.'

'It's
not a job, it's a profession. You might come back here for a nap, then you've
your office "do" at the Beeswing.'

'The
Chief says he has an important bit of business he wants to mention to me at the
Beeswing,' I said, and the wife frowned.

'But
you've practically left.'

Silence
for a space. I had deliberately stirred the wife up, and felt rather bad about
it.

'It's
not a dangerous bit of business, is it?' she enquired. Would she be so
concerned if she knew that
Robert Henderson
might be put in the way of violence? I liked to think not.

A
needle hung before me. It was the common run of needle - it had an eye in it -
only much bigger, and it did not go away until I started to count the seconds
of its persistence, whereupon it vanished immediately. I saw next a line of
paint tins against a wall in a room. They were not opened, and I knew that I
did not want to see them opened, for I did not like the smell of paint. Close
by, I strongly suspected, was a rattling window and beyond that the sea, which
was black with something ... something starting with the letter B, and ending
in S. The sea was black with
butlers:
dark-coated men bathing. No, couldn't be. That wasn't the word.

Now
bells rang about me on the dark coal plain, and the floorboards over my head
were being lifted one by one. It appeared that they were not nailed down, for
they came away very easily. Two men worked at the job. Both wore rough
guernseys and some species of gumboots, and as they worked they rose and fell
with the coal plain, and with me. Above them, a night sky was gradually being
revealed: a mighty and expanding acreage of stars and racing wisps of cloud. I
fixed on one very bright star, and that was a mistake, for the act of watching
it brought back the sickness, and the French word came to me:
mal de mer.
I had heard that somewhere of late.

As
I watched in wonder, I counted the bells. Had there been eight strokes in all?
One of the two men wore a hat that might have been a captain's peaked cap, but
there was no braid and no badge, as though he wanted to keep back his identity.
His face was brownish and square. The other's face, beard and hair were all
grey, and he was now down on the coal with me, fastening up a tunic with two
rows of brass buttons. The man who remained above, standing on the edge of the
ragged skylight that he'd had a hand in making, shouted a question to the one standing
over me, and I could not make it out, but I knew from the tone that he must be
the governor, and I heard the reply: 'They're all aft, skipper.' He was foreign
in some way, this second man. He put a bit of a'd' sound at the beginning of
'they're', in a way that made the word seem babyish. But he looked a hard case,
as did the other.

Another
bell was rung - a bell that existed in an altogether different world - and it
brought me to wakefulness sitting alone in my best suit on the top deck of the
Number Nine tram. Friday evening and the tram running along, and my memory
doing so once again as well. We ran along under the York lamps and only a
scattering of stars, making for the place where easternmost York came to a
stop: the Beeswing Hotel. The conductor was hanging off the platform, and
joshing with various street loungers that we passed, like a performer on a
moving stage. His high, cracked voice floated up the staircase but hadn't kept
me from sleep. I had not slept in the afternoon as the wife had suggested, and
I was dead tired, for I'd been awake all night fretting about my meeting with
Parker.

In
fact, our 'conversation' had been just that, and we had not touched on the
doings of Mr Buckingham, reasonable or otherwise. 'I have satisfied myself that
you are not a fool, Mr Stringer,' Parker had said, but he'd taken two and a
half hours about it, in the course of which he'd introduced me to every man in
the office. He'd asked me a good deal about Lydia, and I wondered at first
whether he was one of her not-so-secret admirers like Robert Henderson, but I
decided he was more nervous of her than anything. 'She is a rather forward
party,' he had said, which I thought rather forward of
him.
Then again, in the summer of i9i3 she had intercepted him on
his bicycle in the middle of York, and put it to him that I might have a start
in his office.

'How
did she know it was me?' Parker had asked, towards the end of our interview. My
answer was pretty well-greased. I told him he was a famous York character,
often mentioned in the
Yorkshire Evening Press
as chairing
the police court or speaking at society events, or addressing the Historical
Society on the Merchant Adventurers of York, on which he was an expert.

'Yes,
but there's never a photograph, is there?'

That
was true enough. The
Press
only ran to photographs for
convicted murderers.

'...
So how did she know?'

The
truth was that Mr Parker had made the mistake - if that's what it was - of
bicycling out to Thorpe-on-Ouse one summer's evening. As he went on his stately
way along the high street, Harry had called out, 'That's an Ai bike!' It was
one of the best made: a Beeston Humber. As Harry went on about the bike - he
was excited over the expanding sprocket on the rear, which gave half a dozen
different gearings -1 explained to the wife about the rider: about how he was
the star of the police court, the top man in the office to which I often took
our witness statements should a prosecution be under consideration. The wife
had taken note of the man, or perhaps most particularly the bike, and flagged
it down in central York not a week later, just as people stop the knife grinder
on
his
bike when they want something sharpened.

As
we clattered on over the new-laid tram rails, I saw from the windows that a
light rain was falling, and the wind getting up. After the stop at the Spotted
Cow, I caught the whiff of the gas works at Layerthorpe, and heard drunken
chatter coming up the stairs. I turned about and saw Constables Flower and
Whittaker from the York police office, the conductor shouting some jest up
after them. I'd known that Whittaker lived somewhere hereabouts. They were on
their way to the 'do' but half canned already. They nodded along the gangway
when they saw me, but took care to sit well short of where I was.

Everyone
likes having the top deck to themselves, and the arrival of Flower and
Whittaker annoyed me. I knew they thought me a queer fish, and they could never
quite hide the fact. I tried to imagine myself as they saw me: a railway copper
genuinely keen on railways - that marked me down as a nut, for a start. Neither
Flower nor Whittaker would have cared a rap for the Class Z.

I
was in addition a plain suit man - the only one in the office just then - and
they were uniformed. I was their superior, and Chief Inspector Weatherill's
favourite into the bargain. But being the Chief's favourite . . . well, it came
with complications. He had a great liking for danger and excitement but, since
he was nearly seventy, his days of experiencing bother directly were about
done. So he put all the trouble my way, perhaps suspecting I enjoyed it as much
as he had. Or was it just that he thought I had the makings? That I might be
trained up to enjoyment of tangling with the really bad lads if only I was
given enough experience in that line? I didn't know, and it certainly wouldn't
do to ask. The Chief was a force of nature: you took what came from him.