The Blackpool Highflyer (40 page)

He didn't know the wife, of course, but he knew me - and from a fair distance too, even though he was not wearing his spectacles.

'Oh hello,' he said as I came up close (the wife was looking at the stones in the background). 'The green's my home-from- home now that the paddock's gone. Have you come up from Blackpool?'

'I have that,' I said, and I called the wife over and intro­duced her to the boy.

It came out that the wife was working at Hind's, and the boy said: 'Cicely told me she had a new person working with her. I like Cicely. She's a brick, although Dad always used to say she wasn't a great hand at correspondence.'

The boy turned to me, and said: 'Cicely's awfully pretty, don't you think?'

'Well...' I said.

The wife, leaning against the stone, was making funny faces at me as if to say, Now what do we have
here?

'Did you come along on the tram?' said the boy.

I nodded.

'It's smarter here, isn't it?' said the boy. 'It's nothing like Blackpool really, even though we're sort of tacked on to it. Our house is one of the first ones in St Anne's, and when we bought it, the Post Office had it down as Blackpool. Dad tries not to be snobby but he played merry hell over that, and he got it changed.'

Lance Robinson was doing his little backward dance on the grass. 'I'm not supposed to say that,' he said. 'Merry hell, I mean. I got it from our maid, the one that's gone. Would you like to come to tea?'

'Oh no,' said the wife immediately, and quite horrified.

'Yes,'
I said. 'That's very kind of you.'

I wanted to see the
Bradshaws
that Robinson was sup­posed to keep lined up on his shelves. I wanted to see the fellow's motorcar, not that I could remember much of the one that had followed us to the Fylde, or the one that had frightened old Hind to death.

Lance Robinson turned and I began to follow him. The wife was fixed to the spot. But she followed along after a little while, and began chatting brightly enough to the boy: 'This is a lovely spot, isn't it? I don't think we can take tea, although it is awfully kind. Perhaps we'll just say a very quick hello to your father, who's a very pleasant gentleman . . . But we shan't come into the house.'

We were passing by an empty bandstand now, and step­ping off the green. The boy wasn't used to walking with other people; he was going too fast, and his green coat was flying out behind him.

'It's the light suiting,' I whispered to the wife, as we fol­lowed the boy down a wide road of tall houses.

'I know,' said the wife. 'It's sad.'

I knew what she meant. At first I couldn't think of the word, but then it came to me. The boy had been put into clothes that made him a kind of experiment in motion - an experiment that had failed.

'Now listen,' the wife whispered, 'we are not to stay.'

'There was no stone on the line for Hind's today,' I said. 'Why not, do you suppose?'

'Oh give it an airing,' said the wife. 'I thought you'd fin­ished with that.'

'I've got to work out why there was a stone before, and why there wasn't one this time. One difference from Whit was that the governors of the mill were not on the train: Hind and Hind Senior. Now think on: who would have wanted to see off the two Hinds? And who might already have done the job on the older one?'

The boy had come to a halt ahead of us. He stood at a turn­ing leading into another wide white road of tall houses with exhibition gardens. He was putting on his glasses as we got near. 'I don't wear them outdoors,' he said, hooking them over his ears with his head down, 'but I'm supposed to.'

This meant we were drawing near.

'Father's not home,' said the boy, looking up.

The wife nodded, and I could see she was relieved.

'He's dreadfully worried,' said the boy.

There was a low fizzing in the street. All the gardens were full of bees.

'The police', said the boy, setting my heart thumping, 'have been here ...'

Where? I thought. Which one is the house? They all looked like tall churches, and they were all joined together: a dark line of giants behind the gardens. You were really meant to see the gardens not the houses.

'How could you lose a mill?' asked the boy from behind his spectacles. 'Dad had one. He sold it, then went in with Hind's and now nothing's left and Mother won't pay calls because then people would have to come back, and they would see we only had one maid ... If a mill came down to
me,'
the boy went on, 'I would sell it straight off and put the money in the Post Office.'

'You said about the police ...' I reminded him.

'No, Jim,' said the wife, shaking her head.

"The Hind's Whit Excursion,' said Lance Robinson. 'They think Father tried to bring it off the line.'

I smartly took off my cap, because I was lost for any other way to react. I wondered whether the police had been work­ing away all summer, like the bees, and whether I had not put them to it myself after what I'd said in the copper shop at Manchester during my funny turn. But it was no use trying to recall just what I
had
said then.

'Well, they're here again,' the boy said, and I knew the house. It was behind the boy, half a dozen along at the end of the road. A wagonette and horse stood outside. There was no motorcar in sight.

The colours in this place were all too high: the boy's green suit, the whiteness of the gateposts and road dust, the colours of the flowers in the gardens; and the pillar box in the middle of the road was red like none before. But the horse was black, and the wagonette was black.

'You must still come for tea,' said the boy.

When the strangeness started I could not say; the boy was walking on, and the wife was saying too loudly, 'Master Lance, Master Lance', as if just saying his name could change something. But the boy walked on and the front door of the house opened as he did so. He walked into it, and the wife turned on her heels and fled. A moment later, I turned and followed.

The tram raced back to Blackpool and seemed to fall into the welcoming arms of the crowd at the Southern Terminus. Blackpool was where the trams belonged.

As we got up from our seat, the wife pinned the white rosette back onto her dress and the quiet of the ride was over.

'I'm sure the boy has it all wrong, you know,' she said. 'The police will just have been asking Mr Robinson questions that might lead them to someone else. They asked you questions, didn't they?'

I nodded. She liked Robinson and didn't want him to be the wrecker, so I said nothing, but my thoughts were running along these lines: perhaps he put the stone on the track not so as to stop the train, but only to stop old man Hind's heart, give him such a shock that he pegged out, while he drove alongside in his motorcar to watch. When that failed, he'd tried again, with the motorcar as the weapon.

No. It was all loopy.

When the wife climbed down from the tram, she said, 'Now
where's
that Tower?' then, a second later, 'Oh!'

Blackpool Tower was the tallest building in England.

'Well,' she said, quite recovered and speaking in her special Yorkshire voice, 'I'm off for me tea.'

I arranged to meet her at six outside the main entrance to the Tower, and she disappeared into the crowd. I remembered about an 'A' cigar that I'd put in my top pocket. I lit it and set off towards the Tower myself. Whether I was pressing against the flow of the crowd or going along with it I couldn't have said; sometimes one, sometimes the other. Inside ten seconds I saw two other fellows smoking big cigars. Blackpool was that sort of place. Down on the beach the crowd was especially thick and you'd see a white arm waved or the top of a pointed hat, and this was a Pierrot show going on.

I was alongside the Tower now - the wife was inside and below, taking tea in the basement.

Music was coming at me from about a dozen different places, and the jangle of it was like those contraptions they have in pubs: the polyphons, which turn very prettily, but never quite seem to play what you'd call a tune. I crossed over the Prom and leant against the railings looking out to sea for a while. There was something about the sea that made you breathe deeply. I smoked my cigar and thought about Robin­son: he had lost everything over the summer suiting, and it was the old man who'd been most particularly set against him. Of that I was now certain.

I looked down, and there on the beach, giving a show, was a ventriloquist with a figure on his knee. It was the good ven­triloquist from the Seashell, Henry Clarke, and the doll was
...
what was the name? Leonard. Young Leonard.

There were steps to the beach nearby. It was hard going, walking over the hot sand in my boots, and I fretted that the turn would end by the time I got to it.

'By gum it's hot work this, you know,' Henry Clarke was saying to the little crowd when I reached the spot. 'My head's fairly throbbing, and I'm starting to sweat all over.'

I was at the back of three rows of kids, but Clarke's voice carried pretty well. He was sitting on a folding stool. There was a bottle propped in the sand before him, with a few cop­pers placed inside to show that's what it was for. Underneath the bottle were some papers, and I knew what these were: handbills for the Seaside Surprises at the Seashell Music Hall.

'It's not quite polite to speak of "sweating" you know,' Henry Clarke was saying to Young Leonard. 'Now let's all hear you say the word "perspiring".'

Leonard looked up quite suddenly then stared around at all the children, his eyes seeming to get wider by the second, but they
couldn't
do that, so it was just something about the face.

'Oh come on now, you know you're awfully good at talk­ing when you've a mind to be. Leonard, I would like to hear you say: "Around the ragged rock, the ragged rascal ran.'"

Leonard looked at Henry Clarke, then out at all of us. 'So would 1’ Leonard said, sounding very glum.

It was all daft stuff but it was real too, and that's why it was funny.

Henry Clarke's folding stool suddenly slipped in the sand, and it was his turn to pull a funny face. This seemed to bring the show to an end, and some of the kids went forward to put money into the bottle.

I put in a penny myself and picked up one of the papers. At the top of the page was Henry Clarke's name. Above it there was nothing. The name of the other ventriloquist, Monsieur Maurice, appeared down below.

'The bill's changed,' I said.

Henry Clarke looked at me with his pleasant face. Leonard was still on his knee. Clarke smiled, perhaps nodding slightly, but saying nothing. He wasn't about to start putting on swank.

One of the kids was pointing at the figure. 'What's he?' he said. The kid was eating a penny lick.

Clarke smiled again. 'Why, this is Leonard,' he said.

Leonard suddenly smiled too, and looked at the boy, who jumped back. It was like electricity.

'He's got a good face,' said another of the kids.

'He has lots of faces really’ said Henry Clarke. 'He has what we call his "By Jove, you don't say!" face.'

And those words were now spelled out in the face of Leonard, just as clearly as if they'd been written.

'And he has his ... well, what we call his "thinking it over" face.'

Now the dummy was all thoughtfulness, nodding gentle-­like.

'Sometimes,' said Clarke, 'he even comes to a conclusion!'

At this, a great look of surprise and happiness appeared on Leonard's face, so that he beamed like the glace kid on the boot-polish tins.

'He's not living though, is he?' said a very little kid, and it was as if he knew the truth but wanted to make quite sure.

'He is not’ said Henry Clarke, which was the kindly answer I thought.

He tipped the dummy forwards and slid the head out of the neck. Leonard's head was just as lifelike as before, but now we all saw that it was on a long pole, with levers and wires attached.

'Superior Professional Movement’ said Henry Clarke, and he winked at me, for this was grown-up stuff. 'Most figures have a set-up called something similar but Leonard's works are more superior and professional than most. His mouth and eyes move at the same time. That's not so out of the common, but it's the
way
they move. You see, the leather around his nose and eyes . . . It's very supple, and the levers draw it in just the right way ...'

He gave us a few more expressions of Leonard's, and it was like watching a musician play his instrument.

'Did you make him?' asked one of the kids.

'Oh I'm not nearly clever enough to do that. Leonard was made by a Mr Pardoe, who lived in Manchester and worked under the name of Zack. He passed on some years ago.'

'Why?' asked one of the kids.

'Why . .. did he pass on?' asked Henry Clarke.

'Why did he go round calling himself Zack?'