God Is an Englishman (97 page)

Then, out of the tail of his eye, he saw the station of Headcorn flash past and a moment later became aware that the train was slow ing down, not gradually, as if GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 520

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approaching a scheduled stop, but abruptly, as brakes were sharply applied, and at the same time he saw, on the track below, a man prancing about with a red flag, re minding him of a frenzied sepoy on the walls of Lucknow, and with in seconds of his stupefied face being lost to view the carriage itself began to bounce and bucket like a horse out of control and they all seemed to be lifted out of their seats and caught up in a mad, senseless jumble of arms and legs and cascading luggage. Without in the least being aware of what had happened he saw Henrietta open her mouth in a soundless scream, and the bemused expression on his son’s face as he was catapulted upwards from Deborah’s lap, and after that a long, grinding jangle that obliterated everything, and a rush of suction that seemed to scoop them up and swill them around like so many leaves in a gale.

He did not relate all these astounding happenings to the train in which they were travelling, or indeed, to anything that had a place in the ordered scheme of things. They were bizarre, apocalyptic occurrences, associated with a gigantic natural disaster of some kind, a tidal wave, an earthquake, or possibly a thunderstorm more violent than any thunderstorm he had ever experienced. And they seemed to go on and on, with the noise getting more deafening, and the gyrations within the compartment ever more violent and com plicated, and then, just as suddenly they ceased, or almost ceased, for rumblings and crackings and splinterings continued at a remove like the long, long echo of a thunderclap rolling away into the dis tance. Then, in the strange silence that followed, he was conscious of a pricking sensation in his cheek and lifted his hand to it, amazed to find that the fingers came away holding a dart of varnished wood about four inches long but feeling no pain and not even realising he was bleeding until he saw blood splash down on to some grey material level with his chin and realised, with sudden and shatter ing certainty, that the material was Henrietta’s paletot, and that the gleaming point sticking through its folds like a lodged arrow was the ferule of her parasol.

Gradually his brain began to clear and he became aware of sub dued uproar around him, an outcry quite distinct from the grind ing, splintering cacophony that had preceded it, a sound issuing from human throats and lungs, a confused, wailing chorus of shouts and groans and screams, some half-heard, others heard at close range. His military reaction to disaster partially reasserted itself and he dashed the blood from his cheek and tried to stand upright, finding that it was possible, in spite of a variety of obstructions, sharp and solid, or soft and rounded.

At last he got his head clear and the first thing he recognised was Deborah’s head and shoulders, hunched and withdrawn, as though she was hugging something GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 521

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close to her body, and then he saw that she was cradling his son Alexander, hedged about by innumerable bundles and that Alex, too, had his mouth wide open in a scream.

The steady drip of blood from his cheek maddened him, for it made concentration very difficult, and he clutched at the material it was spotting and wiped it across his face, finding that his vision cleared and his brain with it, so that he could make some kind of attempt to adjust to the lunatic confusion of a carriage tipped almost at right-angles. He knew then, at least approximately, what had hap pened. The train in which they had been rattling along a few seconds before had all but disintegrated and when, reaching out for Deborah, his eyes came in line with the shattered window, he could look down on a field about fifteen feet below and see men scuttling in all directions, like a swarm of beetles exposed by an overturned stone. Between the window and the field was a wide baulkhead of timber, at least two feet thick and resting, so far as he could determine, on two brick piers that had supported it but there was no track to be seen. To the right, across a wide gap in a bridge, he could see the engine and tender still miraculously upright but listing slightly to one side and half-enveloped in steam.

Behind it, and linked to it presumably, were three coaches, but between the last of these and the spot where his own coach hung suspended was the middle part of the train, a horrid jumble of timber and metal bridging the full width of a small river and already erupting with people, as though a whirlwind had stripped the roof and beams from a village street exposing everything that went on beneath thatch and tiles.

He began now to take deliberate action to free himself from what he thought of as a deadly trap, plucking at the ferule of the parasol, drawing the malacca cane free and using the point to break out the jagged edges of the nearest window. The fragments fell with a suc cession of insignificant crashes and he had his head and shoulders through the aperture and was wrestling with the door handle when Deborah’s voice reached him as a high, imploring wail, “Uncle Adam…help…

help…Alexander…” so that he wrenched himself back, twisting a half-circle, seizing the screaming child by his shoulders, hoisting him over the still form of his daughter and somehow contriving to push him clear of the window where he at once disappeared into the outstretched arms of the ex-coachman Blubb, who was standing on the baulkhead immediately below.

It did not astonish him that Blubb, manager of the Kentish Txri angle, should be there to receive Alexander, only that the child should be removed so effortlessly from his grasp, but as he withdrew himself a second time he became more or less GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 522

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aware of what was happening outside, where the coach hung from a snarl-up of rails and brickwork like a sock from a tangled clothesline. With a sense of wonder and relief that was like the removal of a tremendous weight from his chest he saw too that no one inside the compartment was dead, or even bleeding as he was bleeding, and it seemed miraculous that this could be so, for the woodwork and stuffing of the interior bulged and sagged in all directions, like a sofa that had been ripped and slashed by a dozen drunken swordsmen. Henrietta’s voice came to him faintly and he saw her struggle half-upright, her pale face framed in a tangle of bright, copper hair, her hat reversed but still firmly fixed on her head with its absurd ribbons spilling down the front of her corsage that had split across the middle, revealing the pink petticoat underneath. Then Deborah called to him again and he was struck by the steadiness of her voice as she said,

“I’m not hurt, Uncle Adam…but Stella…
Stella…
there by your knees…” and he glanced down and saw his daughter propped like a folded bolster between the seats, with her little white boots braced against the horsehair of the section of the compartment where Deborah had been sitting. He writhed around, fending off a hamper that had contained their picnic and lifted her clear, moving towards the window backwards, turning and finding there another pair of hands, or perhaps several pairs, reaching out for her over his shoulders, so that she too passed from his grasp. A gravelly voice from outside was saying, “The child…the lady…pass

’em through, mister, for Christ’s sake, before she slips…” and his body began to respond to orders dictated by instinct, for he was unable to think clearly and logically and all the time that infernal drip of blood pumped from his cheek, splashing everything about him.

His next impression was that of receiving the limp body of Deborah from the hands of his wife, who had somehow levered her from the far corner of the compartment, and it seemed to him quite astounding that she had the strength to perform such a feat in flat contradiction to the laws of gravity, for Deborah had been lying half under Henrietta when she had projected Alex upward into his grasp. He saw blood too, and realised that it was not his own, for it was running diagonally across the child’s thigh, but before he could look more closely a bearded face peered down at them from the splintered window frame and he recognised it at once as the face of Dickens and realised that the man was actually addressing him, saying, jerkily, “Door’s locked…they’re
all
locked…wait…!” and one of his hands disappeared, reappearing almost immediately holding a stone, and then more glass fell with a crash, some frag ments inside the compartment, where Stella had been lying a mo ment ago, but more of it outside on the baulkhead.

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He had some kind of grip on himself now and could begin to de liberate as regards actions that, until then, had been little more than reflexes. He could even count and addressed himself to a sum relat ing to the occupants of this shambles, remembering that he had passed three bodies down on to the baulkhead but the power of concentration came and went so that he could not be sure who they were, or in what order they had left the compartment. There had been five of them and three from five left two, himself and one other. He inched himself away from the window, beyond which all hell seemed to be breaking loose, and moved closer to the jumble at the far end and there was Henrietta, face downwards in a welter of split cushions and bloodied luggage, and he would have assumed her dead had he not remembered that it was she who had been lying across Deborah’s legs a moment ago and had somehow changed places with her, pushing the child in his direction. He began to work his way down to her, moving very cautiously, for the gravelly voice was still warning him that the coach was finely balanced and that movement inside it might shake it loose and pitch it through the gap into the river with the others.

It seemed to him a long time elapsed before he could grasp her by the shoulders. Her fine clothes were in ribbons but she did not seem injured, although when he called her name she did not respond but stared at him with a curiously hostile expression. It was when he sat back on his hams, bracing himself to lever her between his legs that the carriage itself began to sway and the movement, no more than a gentle rocking motion, had the power to frighten him as nothing had ever frightened him in his life. In blind panic he exerted his full strength, rolling over on his back and dragging her with him, so that her full weight rested on him, her head level with the window. He could see nothing now but he could hear a confused mutter of voices immediately above and assumed hands must be reaching down through the aperture and plucking at her, for the pressure on him moderated and suddenly she was gone and he was sitting there alone holding one of her elastic-sided boots, half-blinded by blood, dazed, breathless, and utterly spent.

The rocking motion he had noticed now became more pronounced and behind it, like the thump of a brass drum, he could detect a harsh, jarring sound, as if the free end of the coach was beating rhythmically on the ground. He understood then that he was lost for very slowly, or so it seemed, the carriage began to spin.

He heard someone call out with terrible urgency and seemingly almost in his ear, but there was nothing more he could do to help himself beyond rolling on his side and crouching between the shattered seats. The sliding movement brought his GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 524

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eyes level with the window and suddenly he glimpsed the sky, blue, cloudless, and, like everything else in that bedlam, gyrating with a slow, ponderous swing. And after that nothing, only a wall of sound that fell on him like tons of masonry.

4

Blubb, clambering on to the step of the last coach and peering down through a window at his employer, was not much astonished by what he saw. The coincidence was swallowed up in the immensity of the occurrence, a small, insignificant piece of a horrific jigsaw in which Adam Swann, his wife, and his family were somehow trapped and almost certain to die. In a disaster of this magnitude identities went by the board. It would not have surprised him to have seen the Queen or the Shah of Persia and all his retinue stagger out of the debris that choked the valley. As it was he did what he could, and what he achieved stemmed not so much from the man he was, old, gross, and short of wind, as the man he had been before those meddle some fools had laced all England with iron rails, boasting that they could now transport passengers from one point to another at twenty times the speed of the old “Tantivy” or ‘Shrewsbury Wonder.” At a price, of course.

Sometimes this kind of price.

Blubb’s reactions, notwithstanding his age, his bulk, and his mountainous prejudice, were as quick or quicker than those of any one at work on that bridge at the time. He had read approaching disaster in the face of the foreman before the man had moved two strides down the line towards the distant figure of the man stationed there, waving his futile little flag at an onrushing boat-train, the smoke of which could already be seen in the cutting. He knew then that nothing could avert a tragedy of fantastic proportions, and that here, on this strip of line, many people would die, or be mutilated. There was no time to shift the pinnace out of the line of danger. What time there was he used to save himself, and used it to ad vantage, plunging down the embankment like a hippopotamus in flight from a dinosaur, then diving under the brick pier supporting his end of the bridge.

He gained sanctuary with seconds to spare. A moment later the avalanche came thundering down on them, scat tering men from the bridge like a shower of peas and filling the air with a diabolical symphony of screaming brakes, hissing steam, rending metal, and human outcry.

From where he crouched, in the limited security of the brick buttress, Blubb had a clear view of the plummeting train, watching, jaw agape, as engine and tender cleared the gap on their own momentum, dragging the first three coaches GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 525