The Last Train to Scarborough (7 page)

'So
he's the coming man of the York Co-op? Wright's very cut up about it. Do you
think you might have a word with her?'

'I
could do, but I wouldn't hold out much hope. He's such a misery. A woman's
entitled to a bit of fun in her life, you know.'

'I
can think of a way of giving you a bit of fun,' I said, and I put down the
Railway Magazine.
'It only
would
be a bit,
mind you.'

'Ten
termini,' said the wife, as I inched over to her side. 'That's going some.'

'Railway Titbits
...' I said. It isn't for the
true rail enthusiast, you know. Come to think of it, I don't suppose most of
its readers could name
one
railway termini.'

'You
can't have one termini,' said the wife, as we fell to.

Later
on, we
still
weren't asleep.

'What
are you thinking about
now
' Lydia asked.

'Just
thinking on,' I said.'. . . I've been promised a lot of things lately:
ownership one day of this house, perhaps; a start at Parker's office; a pound
from
Railway Titbits.
Only thing is ...'

'What?'
said the wife.

'I've
got to go to Scarborough first.'

The
wife eyed me.

'When?'

'Sunday.'

'What?
For the whole day?'

'For
the night.'

'The
night?'

And
that, somehow, was what bothered me: the idea of staying the night in
Scarborough during the off-season, and the suspicion that the Chief hadn't so
much given me a job as set me a trap.

The
sky was not quite black. Proper blackness rolled upwards from the funnel, and
the sky was different to that: a dark, drifting grey. The ship plunged and
rose with no land in view as I walked before the Captain's pistol. The ship was
about the length of an ordinary train and it moved straight, both over and
under the waves like a needle going through cloth. The thread it dragged was a
long line of white in the blackness of the water. Parts of the decks were
picked out with the white light of oil lamps hung from railings, and here the
decks shone with rolling water. The sea flew at the three of us as we walked.
We were getting some weather now all right, and it was waking me up by degrees.
To my right, a sail was rigged. It was higher than a house and a constant shiver
rolled across it diagonally. It was both white and black, covered in coal dust.
I knew that a steam ship would sometimes rig a sail if the wind served. We were
advancing on the mid-ships, the bridge housing. I couldn't have named all the
ship's points, but some of the right words came to me from Baytown, the
sea-side place where I'd been born. In going to Scarborough I had returned to
the sea and that had been a mistake, but I could not just then have said why or
how. I had gone too near the edge of land and somehow fallen
off
the edge, and the sea had taken me.

I
turned about and saw the Captain, with gun held out.

'Where
are we going?'

'Aft,'
he said.

Another
sea came, breaking white over the decks and soaking me through, but that was
quite unimportant. The pressing matter was the pain in my temples. Coming fully
awake seemed to have brought it on. I did not want to look left or right - that
was one result of it; and I wanted to sit down. I wanted badly to sit down and
be sick. After that, I wanted breathing time to remember who I was. I had been
imagining myself in all the places I knew a certain Detective Stringer to have
been and I knew that I had at one time kept a warrant card in my suit-coat
pocket that would very likely carry that name, but I did not want to look at it
just in case I had confused myself with someone else. We stopped at another
ladder, and another wave flew at us. We were like the clowns in the circus who
attract buckets of water wherever they go. I was meant to climb this ladder;
the Captain held my arm as I did it.

'We
must get to the bottom of this business,' I said, and he made no reply. I made
two further remarks to him as I climbed the ladder: 'Are you two the whole
ship's company?' and then, 'This is a bad affair.' All three remarks went
unanswered, and no wonder.

The
ladder took us to a low iron door that was on the jar. I pushed at it, and we
were into a saloon: here was a lessening of the coal smell. White-painted
planks had been fitted to the iron to make wooden walls. I noted an oil lamp on
a bracket, two couches, a wooden chair; books on a folding table. Another
ladder, or something between a ladder and a staircase, came down into the
middle of this room.

'Do
go up,' the grey man seemed to say. It sounded as though he was asking
politely, but that wasn't it. 'Go,' he repeated, as I eyed him. There was
spittle always behind his teeth when he spoke, as though the sea rose and fell
inside him as well as all around.

At
the top of the stairs was a bare wooden chart room, if that be the right
description. It was the room set behind the bridge, anyhow. The for'ard side of
it was all window save one slatted wooden door that was
half
window, and this banged constantly so that the sight of the
ship's bows, and the wild seas breaking over them, came and went. The Captain
walked directly through this door onto the bridge, and I was left alone with
the ghostlike foreigner, who kept silence. The water rolled thickly and slowly
over the window like quicksilver; the door clattered, and I glimpsed for an
instant the edge of the ship's wheel, the binnacle alongside, and a hand upon
the wheel. It was not the Captain's hand - so there was at least a third crewman
in the know. I heard a rapid pass of words between the Captain and this new man,
but I could make out no word in particular over the crashing waters, the rising
wind and the banging door, save perhaps the single faint bell of the telegraph
as an order was passed from bridge to engine room. The Captain came back in,
removed his cap, and drew his sleeve once over his forehead, which was all that
was needed for him to recover from exposure to the storm, just as though he'd
been walking fast on a summer's day and worked up a light sweat. The door
continued to clatter behind him, and I wished he would shut it permanently, for
I was half frozen, and the iron stove in the corner of the room burned too low.

The
Captain's hair was practically shaved right off, which made him look foreign. They
went in for shaved heads in France, and I fancied there was something about his
square face not quite English. The word came to me at length: his face was too
symmetrical;
but he
was
English -
north of England too, going by the few words he'd spoken. He stood directly
opposite to me, with the chart table in-between us. The uppermost chart was
quite as big as the table top, and showed a sea full of tiny numbers, but I
could not make out
what
sea. A parallel ruler rested upon it, together with an oil
lamp and a black book. To the side of the table stood the grey man - the grey
Dutchman, as I had now decided - who indicated a chair at the table, and seemed
to say, 'Sit down, I dink you want shum corfee.'

I
will set down his words normally from now on. He was always only a little 'off
in his English, and of the two he seemed the better disposed towards me. But I
did not think he was fit for life beyond this ship. Where the Captain was perhaps
in the middle forties, the other was in the middle fifties; his beard and face
tried to outdo each other for greyness, and it was the dead greyness of
driftwood.

The
Dutchman quit the room, perhaps to fetch coffee, and I sat down. This ought to
have brought some comfort, but instead the movement brought a worsening of my
headache. It was a pain that came as a kind of mysterious brightness, a kind of
electricity. But the room we were in was dark, and the Captain's face was dark.
He laid the small revolver on top of the chart, took his own seat, and lit an
oil lamp that stood on top of the chart. He then took a pen from his pocket,
and briefly scrawled something in the book that lay on the chart. I supposed
this to be the ship's logbook, but nothing about the book gave away the name of
the vessel, and it was impossible to read the Captain's handwriting - which
seemed to me illegible in any case - in the brief instant of time before he
shut the book.

'Why
do you have the gun?' I enquired.

'Because
we're minded to shoot you,' he said, blowing out the match.

He
sat back in his chair, and picked up a pencil. He looked at it.

'You
are the Captain,' I said, after a space.

He
nodded once, in a mannerly sort of way, still inspecting the pencil. A further
interval of silence passed.

'Being
the Captain, you might at least take a glance at that fucking chart
occasionally.'

No
answer.

'And
the other one, the one who's gone for the coffee ... he's the First Mate.'

The
Captain nodded again, put down the pencil.

'I
want a change of clothes, hot water and soap,' I said.

I
considered letting this fellow know that I had a family, but it would have been
wrong to bring them into it. I had considered them too little of late. In fact
I had done them some wrong that I could not quite bring to mind, and this was
the penalty: I would be removed from their lives altogether.

'Sea captain,'
I said, looking up. 'In the town
where I was born every other bloody
man
was a sea
captain.'

'Who
are
you?' asked the Captain.

I
raised my hand to the inside breast pocket of my suit-coat. The pocket had
survived whatever had happened to me; the warrant card had not.

'You
know,'
I said.

'But,
you see ... we want to hear it from you,' said the Mate, returning with coffee.

I
nodded slowly at him, and the thing was: I didn't know the half of it.

The
North End shed, a quarter mile beyond the station mouth, was where the
Scarborough engines were stabled. I felt a proper fool, approaching the Shed
Superintendent's office with my kit bag, just as I had in the days when I'd been
working with a company rule book in my inside pocket, and not as some species
of actor.

It
had turned into a nothing sort of a day -1 would have had it hotter or colder,
darker or sunnier. The church bells of the city would not leave off, and their
racket drifted over the complicated railway lands that lay at the very heart
of York. I was tired out. I'd hardly slept on Friday or Saturday night. There
were many new noises in our new house: Sylvia reckoned that the branch of the
big sycamore tree tapped on her window - 'but only at nights'.

'It
taps when there's a wind,' Harry had corrected her.

The
thought of taking articles and becoming a railway solicitor made me hot and
cold. It was like a fever. One minute, I could imagine the whole enterprise
going smoothly on and myself going to the Dean Court Hotel alongside the
Minster - which was the refuge of the top clerks in the North Eastern offices -
wearing a grey, well-brushed fedora hat. But it would keep coming back to me
that the profession I was entering was unmanly. It came down to this: the
lawyers only talked about the railway, instead of doing anything to make the
trains go.

I
wore my great-coat on top of my second best suit. I had on a white shirt and
white necker, and I carried in my kit bag a change of shirt and a tie in case
the boarding house should turn out to be a more than averagely respectable one.
I carried no rule book, but on my suit-coat lapel I'd pinned the company
badge, this being the North Eastern Railway crest about one inch across. All
company employees were given one on joining, and the keener sorts would wear it
every day. You'd be more likely to see a driver or a fireman wearing his badge
than a booking office clerk because the footplate lads took more pride in their
work.

I
had taken off my wedding ring, partly because it didn't do to fire while
wearing a ring - there were plenty of things to snag it on - and partly because
Ray Blackburn had been a single man, and I wanted to place myself as far as
possible in his shoes. (He'd been engaged, evidently, but surely no engine man
would ever wear an
engagement
ring.) My railway police warrant card I carried in my
pocket book, which was in the inside pocket of my suit-coat. I'd need it if it
came to an arrest, but I did not envisage having to produce it, and it must be
kept out of sight for as long as I was passing myself off as an engine man.

The
Super guarded the shed from his little office, which was stuck onto the front
of it like a bunion, spoiling what would otherwise have been a perfectly
circular brick wall, for the North Shed was a roundhouse. He was expecting me,
and seemed to have been thoroughly briefed by the Chief. He had me sign the
ledger which was kept underneath a clock in a little booth of its own, the
whole arrangement putting me in mind of a side altar in a church. The ledger
was really a big diary. The left hand page for Sunday, 15 March 1914 was the
booking-on side, and that was clean. But the booking-off side was dirty because
those blokes had spent the past ten hours at close quarters with coal, oil ash
and soot. It came to me that this was just how it had been at Sowerby Bridge
shed when I'd been firing for the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway eight years
since.