The Last Train to Scarborough (37 page)

The
chief said 'carriage' when he meant 'compartment'. He was old-fashioned in that
way.

'I
don't care for the smell in this one,' he continued, as he pulled open the
door.

'And
what smell is that?'

'Lawyer
,' he said, and he disappeared
along the corridor.

I
sat alone until Kirkham Abbey came up - a good twenty minutes. Then I too stood
up and walked along to the next compartment. From the corridor, I looked
through the window at the Chief, who was sitting there with the gas lamps
turned up full. He hardly ever read on a train, but would always sit under
bright light. The lamp immediately above him illuminated his head in such a way
that I could count the hairs. There were not more than a dozen. I shoved open
the door, and entered the compartment. I sat down facing the Chief. He met my
gaze while exhaling smoke, at which my gaze shifted somewhat to the left - to
the 'No Smoking' sign pasted on the window.

'I'm
not complaining on my own account,' I said. 'It's my job to go into dangerous
places.'

'Congratulations,'
said the Chief. 'It's only taken you ten fucking years to work that one out.'

'But
you shouldn't have sent Tommy Nugent.
Why
did you send
him?'

'He
wanted to go,' said the Chief. 'He was bored. There's a lot of it about, you
know.
I'm
bored listening to you.'

I
watched the dark fields roll by the window. There was absolutely nothing at all
between bloody Barton Hill and Strensall.

'Who
was the man you were speaking to in the station when we came back from the
Beeswing?' I said. 'It seems an age since, but it was only Friday. You weren't
over-keen that I saw you.'

'None
of your fucking business,' said the Chief, and just at that moment I
knew.

'Do
you want me to stay on the force?' I said.

'It's
not obligatory,' replied the Chief, and now we were in
his
silence, and we remained in it all the way back to York.

On
arrival at the station, I walked through the arch in the Bar Walls to Toft
Green, where the Grapes public house was dwarfed by the new railway offices. It
was a perfect little jewel box of a pub, with the name spelled out in the
stained glass of the window. The name of the landlord - the new landlord -
appeared over the door: John Mitchell, licensed to sell beers, wines and all
the rest of it. He was holding a cheerful conversation at the bar, and I broke
in on it directly by asking whether Chief Inspector Saul Weatherill of the
railway police had wanted to hold a 'do' in the pub.

'Aye,'
said Mitchell, a bit dazed.

'You
spoke to him about it at the station on Friday, didn't you?'

Mitchell
nodded.

'What
was it in aid of?' I enquired.

'Leaving
'do' for a fellow call Stringer. Why?'

The
Chief, then, had
not
bargained on me dying in Scarborough, and not only had he
come to terms with my leaving the force, but he was willing to make a party of
it. It was this that decided me.

'You
may as well forget about it,' I said. 'I'm Stringer, and I en't leaving.'

At
King's Cross station, a succession of pointing-finger signs directed me to:
'King's Cross for St Pancras', which was the Underground station; the booking
office of same, where I bought a penny ticket; and the southbound platform of
the Hampstead Tube.

Charing
Cross Underground station was being rebuilt, I discovered on arrival, but the
pointing fingers were there as well, directing me past the men hammering,
sawing, mixing cement - and onto the platforms of the District Railway, where I
waited for a westbound train while figuring in my mind a particular bench in
the Museum Gardens at York, the one set just before the ruins of St Mary's Abbey.
It was there - on the day of my return from the London docks - that I had told
the tale of Paradise to the wife, taking care to put a quantity of rouge and
kohl onto Amanda Rickerby's face and a good ten years onto her age.

'She
was a scarlet woman,' the wife had said, in an amused sort of voice, as though
to save me the trouble of going to any further lengths.

Naturally,
I also left out my own blushes and faltering speech, my own keenness to be in
the company of the lady. But I did admit that she had taken my hand in the ship
room on the second, fatal evening.

'And
what did you do then?' the wife asked.

'Nothing,'
I said, and the wife had kept silence.

'Don't
you believe me?' I said.

'I
know you did nothing, Jim,' she said, and it seemed to me that she sounded
almost disappointed, as though I'd failed her own sex. She also sounded
distracted, and it struck me that I ought to have predicted that she would be.
Whenever you have some important matter to relate and you've taken a time working
yourself up to doing it, you invariably find that the person you're telling it
to is thinking of something else entirely - something much more important, or
at least more closely touching upon their own lives, which comes to the same
thing.

'Have
you seen Robert Henderson lately?' I asked, when I'd come to the end of my
tale.

'Yes,'
she said, and in that moment everything hung in the balance. The white stones
of the ruined abbey were no longer beautiful; instead they were just so many
tombstones, a representation of death.

'He
came over to see me yesterday,' said Lydia.

'To
do what?' I said, eyeing her.

'To
make love to me.'

'Hold
on a minute,' I said, turning to her on the bench.

'I
told him to kindly leave the house immediately,' said the wife, and the abbey
and the gardens, with the crocuses and daffodils and speckless blue sky were
all beautiful again.

'But
there was a difficulty, of course,' said the wife.

'I'll
say there is,' I said. 'It's
his
bloody house.'

The
wife nodded and stood up, startling the peacock that had wandered up to our
bench.

'You've
to come with me, Jim,' she said.

'Where
are we off to?' I asked, as she set off at a lick.

'He
told me', Lydia said, as we tore past the observatory, through the gates of the
gardens and out into Museum Street where a trotting pony with trap behind
nearly did for us both, 'that there would be a general rent increase across the
estate, and that he would let me know about it shortly.'

'Christ,'
I said, trotting myself to keep up with the wife as she turned a corner.
'That's going some. He's a bigger bastard than I thought.'

'Don't
use that language, Jim,' said the wife, as we marched diagonally across St
Helen's Square with very little regard for the folks in the way.

'I
told him', the wife said, addressing me over her shoulder, 'that he had better
let me buy this house immediately on the terms mentioned when we rented it.'

'And
what were they?' I asked, shouting over the barrel organ played by the bloke
who stood every day at the start of Davygate. (Wanting to limit my dealings
with Henderson, I'd kept out of the detailed negotiations about the house.)

'He'd
said we could have it for a hundred and fifty,' the wife called back.

'Well,'
I said, dodging one bicyclist and nearly running into another as a result,
'he'll just go back on that, won't he?'

'Oh
no,' said the wife, 'he agreed to it there and then. He was very shamefaced. I
think he knew he'd done wrong.'

'Well,
he'll know for certain when I go round tomorrow and smash his face in,' I said.

'You
won't, Jim.'

'I
bloody will.'

'You
won't, Jim, because he's off to India. Sailing first thing in the morning -
looking after his father's interests out there.'

'It's
about time he got a job,' I said. 'I suppose that's why he tried it on.' 'Very
likely,' said the wife, and we were now outside the door of the Yorkshire Penny
Bank on Feasgate. It was where the wife kept her inheritance from her
mysterious, very Victorian father who'd died, extremely ancient, shortly after
our marriage and who'd owned more than one London property.

'You've
not enough to buy the house,' I said.

'Have
you never heard of a mortgage, Jim?' said the wife, pushing open the door; and
I saw that she'd brought all sorts of household papers in her basket.

An
hour later we were at our other favourite bench - in the little park next to
the Minster. The wife had arranged the mortgage in record time but even so we'd
missed the start of Evensong in the great cathedral, about which I was secretly
quite pleased - and the wife hadn't minded too much. She was happier than I'd
seen her in a good while.

'What's
the medieval word for what he was proposing, Jim?'

'Same
one as today,' I said. 'A fuck.'

The
wife frowned at me, for a pair of respectable ladies happened to be passing by
our bench at just that point.

'I
don't think those blokes with the broad swords and the boiling oil were too
particular about polite language,' I said.

'Droit de seigneur
;' said the wife, 'that's it,' and
she shook her head.'... Incredible in this day and age.'

'We
might go in after the first reading, if you like,' I said, nodding towards the
Minster.

'All
right, let's,' she said, and she took my hand.

'By
the way,' I said, rising from the bench, 'I'm not going into that solicitor's
office.'

I
had been expecting an explosion; instead we kissed.

'I'm
so relieved, Jim,' she said. 'I could hardly bear to bring it up after all the
work you've put in. But now that we've a mortgage to repay you've got to be earning,
and the wages of an articled clerk just wouldn't have been enough.'

We
walked over to the east entrance of the Minster, and an usher in a red robe
came up to us just inside the door, whispering, 'Are you for Evensong?'

'I
am,' said the wife. 'My husband's going to take a pint of beer and meet me
afterwards.'

I
grinned at her, and we might have kissed again had it not been for that usher.

I
found 92 Victoria Street within ten minutes of quitting Victoria Station. One brass
plaque by the door read 'William Watson, Tailor', another 'The Railway Club,
est'd 1899'. The door was firmly locked, but then the talk would not begin for
another six and a half hours, it being just then only one o'clock. I might
return for it, but really I had only walked up to the door in order to
establish the exact location - just in case any railway-minded person should
ask me about it.

I
turned and retraced my steps, entering the station on the west side, under the
awning belonging to the London, Brighton and South Coast end of the Victoria
operation. The names of the principal destinations were painted on a long board
mounted over the awning, and I read: 'Hastings, St Leonard's, Bexhill,
Pevensey, Eastbourne ...'

I
bought my ticket, and found the train waiting on the platform with all doors
invitingly open. As the guard began slamming them shut I was not so much
reading as gazing down at my copy of the
Yorkshire Evening Press.
In Scarcroft Road a York councillor had made a miraculous escape from a burning
house. I'd been reading the same words for five minutes, and it seemed
impertinent for the paper to be telling me about York while I sat in one of the
grandest stations in London, so I folded it up and put it aside. Shortly
after, the train jolted into life and we were rolling out from under the glass
canopy into a beautiful, sky-blue afternoon. We soon began to make good speed,
and I wondered a little - but only a little - about the engine. I had not
walked up for a look at it, just as I had not looked at the one that had
carried me south from York, and I believe that I only really noticed one
station on the way from Victoria: Lewes, where the gulls screamed over the
goods yard even though we were still twenty miles from the sea.

I
continued in my distracted state as I walked south from Eastbourne station
along Terminus Road. Why did I walk south? I had no firm idea, but that way led
to the front, which was the main attraction of Eastbourne in sunny weather.
After ten minutes' walking I came to the sea, and in my mind's eye the paper
fan unfolded.

The
frontage was called the Grand Parade, and it was just that: motors, carriages,
bath chairs and pedestrians - and every face turned towards the glittering
waters of the English Channel. I joined the throng for a while, before
descending towards the Prom where a narrower parade was going on for walkers
and bath chair patients only. Out on the milky sea there was only one vessel to
be seen - a sailing boat - and it brought to mind a sign posted in York station
for the benefit of engine men: 'Make No Smoke', which made me think in turn of
Captain Rickerby. Since his escape, it had come out that one of the constables
meant to be guarding him and Klaason at Greenwich had been a seaman who'd
sailed under Klaason in deep waters ten years since, and I'd thought it very
big of the Port of London Authority police to admit as much.