A Station In Life (26 page)

Perversely, my
scepticism persisted.  For although I have never travelled the world, and all I
knew of its troubles was that they are legion, it seemed to me that a tranquil
vicarage with its cultivated garden, attentive servants and copious stipend,
was a questionable place from which to step into the pulpit with moral
teachings for the poor and wretched.  It perplexed me that folk whose misery
stemmed mainly from domestic overcrowding and uncertainty of income should seek
salvation through words conceived in a comfortable enclave of serenity like
this, rather than the more honest Ecclesiastes which reminds us:
‘All things
are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
nor the ear filled with hearing.’

Perhaps Miss Blake’s evil
charcoal burner had possessed me to think such a thing but my observations made
me uneasy that the good Book had been misinterpreted.

It was 5pm and the
delicate chime of a Swiss carriage clock that twinkled upon the mantelpiece competed
feebly with the deep toll of a grandfather clock in the hall.  Even in this
mechanical uproar did I find allegory.  To wit, that I was that fragile
carriage clock and the church the dominant grandfather clock, and in the
business of evil presences my tentative dinging would be overpowered by
resounding clangs.

I had met the Reverend
Gittings before.  He had visited me during my first week in Upshott to welcome
me to the fold, and I had disappointed him with news that I was no church-goer
on account of my hours of duty.  Whilst I had expected the parson of a railway
parish to understand the stationmaster’s predicament regarding worship, and had
told him that per force I nourished my faith in my own way, he had not been
persuaded.  But then, of course, a stationmaster is fair game in the building
of a congregation.

The lethargic clunk of
the grandfather clock grew louder as the vicar entered the room.  I was deep in
thought at the time, gazing through the mullioned window at red a squirrel
flitting about upon the lawn, and so my reception of the clergyman was more a
flinch of surprise than a smile.  Nevertheless he greeted me with outstretched
arms.

The Reverend Mr
Gittings, whom I estimated to be in his late forties, cut a short figure but
would have been good exercise to circumnavigate.  He stared at me with eyes
magnified by a pair of small, oval spectacles which gave him the appearance of
a tired fish, and succumbed to an attack of rapid sniffing, perhaps suffering
from hay fever.  Scarcely had I risen to declare the purpose of my visit than
he took both my hands and shook them so vigorously as to drive me back into my
seat.

When I recovered my
balance he invited me across the room to a pair of facing Morris chairs which,
by the look of them, he kept in reserve for private consultations.  Here he opened
our dialogue with a penetrating drone which I imagine he had cultivated for
delivering sermons to inattentive ignoramuses.  He listened patiently and
without interruption while I described the strange effect Miss Blake was having
upon me, and did not flinch when I spoke of the unearthly noises that had beset
my station.  He did react, however, when I made reference to the alleged
heathen burial.  An eyebrow twitched.

Essentially calm though
the minister had remained while audiencing a report of his parish’s
inexplicable happenings his countenance drifted towards outright indifference
while hearing of the hog pudding incident.  Yet this, at least, could provide
him with tangible evidence to consider, for afterwards there was no pudding
where there had been one before.  The vicar’s lack of alarm made me wonder if
he had investigated such unimaginable stirrings in his time that, to him, a
vanishing hog pudding was little more than an All Hallows fright.

Upon completion of my
unburdening the vicar emitted a long, quavering hum and polished his
spectacles.  His demeanour remained one of disinterest for some while, as
though the solution was too obvious to bother with.  The solution may have been
obvious to him but not to me, so I applied patience while he poised himself to
cast judgement upon the matter.  While enduring the vicar’s lengthy
protractions I came to perceive how little he understood my need of his
verdict, for instead of speaking he simply stared at me through his dense lenses
and erupted into another burst of sniffing.  This episode lasted, by design, until
it dawned upon me that his nasal nutations had nothing to do with hay fever.

The clergyman’s
sniffing, I realised at last, was a form of communication rather like Morse code,
and currently it conveyed a question.  You see, unlike Morse code, sniffing
code was easy to decipher and I interpreted his signal thus:

‘Since you attend
none of my sermons, by what right do you seek the benefit of my wisdom away
from the pulpit?’

I had been warned of the
cleric’s wiles and so dismissed his coded eructation with a bold yet simple
request:

“If you please, Reverend,
I require only a glance at the parish records to put my mind at rest.”

More sniffing followed,
but this faltered when I held my ground with a stony face.  Eventually, having
realised that in the arena of awkward silences I was his equal, the taciturn
clergyman deigned to give counsel.

“Hmmmmya,” he began. 
“Since being the parson here I have tried to impress upon the directors of your
railway the profanity of running trains on the Sabbath.  As yet I have had no
success.”

What had this to do with
my ghost?  I recoiled from the vicar’s expanding face to gather my wits.

Gauging my reaction to
his tangent, the vicar tried his hand at another awkward silence and I could
see that our duel was not yet over.  Indeed, it became obvious that a bargain
was to be struck before any advice would be forthcoming.  Frankly I had no
objection to this, but to administer my adversary a dose of his own medicine I
parried him with a neutral smile and a silence more audacious than any tried so
far.

The Reverend Gittings,
off balance at last, peered over his lenses at me curiously as if to check that
I was not a smudge upon his spectacles, then asked lingeringly:

“I trust you will do me
a small kindness then, Mr Jay?”

I could guess the nature
of this kindness and parried him instantly with a caution.

“I am afraid that my
influence upon the railway is very limited, vicar.  Alas the directors of the
South Exmoor company do not seek the moral guidance of stationmasters when
formulating new timetables.  Nevertheless I am at your disposal insofar as I am
able, and will gladly convey to the Board any protest you may wish to make.”

Truth to tell, I was in
favour of Sunday travel, but I did not fret upon this contentious subject
because I knew that if the minister succeeded in preventing just one Sunday
train from running he would be the first pedagogue to do so.  Actually, he
would be the second.  The first, of course, was that famous Eton college
headmaster who denied his town the convenience of Sunday trains by the most
foolproof means imaginable.  Arguing that it would be a danger to his boys, he
dissuaded the mighty Great Western railway from constructing a line there in
the first place!

The Vicar of Saint
Martha believed that where moral persuasion failed it was necessary to separate
the sinner from his weakness with an insuperable barrier, and in this endeavour
he submitted his message of enlightenment, via me, to the railway’s Board of
Directors.

“If the moral decline of
our nation is to be checked, the Sabbath must be set aside exclusively for
spiritual reflection,” he droned mournfully.

The vicar did not seem
flattered that I required a pencil and paper to retain his profundity. 
However, our bargain struck, he called for my hat and stick and offered to
escort me to the sacristy to view the parish records.

We were about to leave
when the comely Mrs Gittings entered the room and declared that she had laid the
table.  Surprised to find her spouse in conference she gathered her wits and
insisted upon laying an extra place for me, my gesticulations to the contrary
counting for nothing.  What else could I do but capitulate and accept
graciously, even though this doomed me to more of the vicar’s moral lobbying. 
Relieved of my hat and stick again, I took directions for the dining room.

At the table I was not
sure what like of repast lay before me, for it was somewhat late in the day for
high tea yet a trifle early for dinner.  The table was haphazard with bread,
jam, and cake, but also venison.  Venison is no stranger to the Exmoor table,
you understand, but preserved in aspic rather than hung is another matter. 
Stranger still were the huge jars of pickled eggs, gherkins and onions that lay
among the garnishes plucked from the garden.  Indeed I had never seen so many
comestibles suspended in vinegar.  As the vicar prised open one of these jars,
having accelerated Grace to get to it, I resisted the temptation to watch him
pursue an onion with his fork.  Instead I made polite conversation with his
infinitely more sociable wife.

At the close of our
alimentary odyssey I was escorted across the glebe and admitted to the church. 
Here, much to my dismay, studies verified both the burial of a lost soul,
quote:
‘… on common land in the shadow of Splashgate hill,’
  and the
subsequent unearthing of his remains during construction of the railway in
Eighteen-Fifty-Nine.  The baneful outcast so buried was alleged to have
murdered children, terrorised all who entered Bessam forest and, by evil
practises, perverted the course of justice.  There was also an account of the
heathen’s slow, agonising death, poisoned by persons unknown.  The reading
would have chilled the blood in any God fearing man.

Upon stepping out into
the daylight, digesting the meaning of what I had read, I received from the
vicar an uncharacteristically generous flow of information regarding my
wellbeing.  Like a man possessed he effused all manner of warnings about the
danger to my soul from this evil-doer.

“By not attending church
regularly, Mr Jay, you are as a lamb separated from the Lord’s flock,” he
enlightened me.  “These disturbances you are experiencing are the opening of
the wolf’s jaw and you shall be lost at sea unless you sail into the harbour of
Saint Martha without delay.”

Mostly I was bewildered
by this pronouncement, consequently did not take sufficient fright.

I shook hands with the
vicar and said goodbye under the sombre overhang of a yew tree, then strode
pensively across the graveyard to the lichgate.  Thereafter, taking a shortcut
to the station, I followed a footpath alongside the cemetery towards Harvey’s
farm.  Here, alas, I came to grief when my boots collided and brought me to a
stumbling halt.  Stopped thus, my head wobbled with the minister’s mixed
metaphors and lolloped to one side.  I might have guessed that the cleric’s
words of comfort would bring no comfort but I had not envisaged such delayed
effect.  I rested my haunches upon the cemetery wall and mopped my brow.

Shortly, rejuvenated by
the soft evening light and serenaded by a solitary blackbird, I resumed my
journey home.  But scarcely had I got to my feet when I heard rapid sniffing.  I
looked to my left and spotted, between a tall tombstone and a terrace of
almshouses, a ghostly surplice over-arched by dark firs.  The vicar had been
watching me.

“I look forward to
seeing you at evensong,” he crooned in the manner of a commercial traveller
closing a deal.

Inadvisably, perhaps, I
did not attend church this eventide, for I felt sure that the Lord understood a
railway’s prior claim upon a stationmaster’s time, early closure of Upshot
station on Sundays providing me with the solitude I needed to cast up the
books.  This job took hours, for it involved reckoning up the week’s coal and
oil takings and checking that all the freight accounts were settled, and for
some reason there would always be that pesky truckle of cheese or tod of wool
unaccounted for.  In addition, the passenger receipts had to be tallied with
all the ticket stubs.  If there had been any fiddling or blunders during the
week, this was when I discovered it.

My labours were
interrupted by a suspicious character lurking among the trees behind the
stables.  I spotted the intruder while returning from the Coal office with a
bundle of waybills and, needless to say, he did not stop when I challenged
him.  Instead, with rain reducing visibility, the sneak-thief was able to run
off and melt away into the blurry landscape beyond the station.

Needless to say, theft
of railway property was considered legitimate sport in some quarters, and with
this in mind I resolved to summon the constable of Blodcaster next day.  To
facilitate this I noted down the trespasser’s appearance, insofar as I was
able, and observed that in stature he looked much like Diggory, having scurried
away with the same gangling agility.  Of course, it was inconceivable that
Diggory would steal anything but the coincidence was useful because when asked
for a description of the intruder I would merely have to point a finger.

As the hours slipped
away I completed my bookkeeping by the fitful light of a table-lamp, during
which time the rain ceased.  But with the humidity rising, the barometer
falling, and a continuous rumble roaming among the hills, it was evident that
an electrical storm was approaching.