The Last Train to Scarborough (2 page)

'You
could set your watch by him,' I said, as he came to about three hundred yards'
distance from us.

'You
could not,' said Harry. 'It's twenty past six. Last night he was here at five
past.'

'Take
your arm away, father,' said Sylvia.

I
removed my arm, and we watched Shannon come on.

'He
looks all-in,' said Harry.

'Well,
we're the last house he does,' I said.

'I
know that,' said Harry. (He was a bright boy and it seemed that he knew most
things of late.)

'I
think it's ever so nice of him to come all this way,' said Sylvia, who then
tumbled forward onto the cinder track that ran under the gate. She was quite
unhurt, and climbed straight back up, saying, 'Don't worry, my pinny's still
clean.' It was clean on, and she knew she'd catch it from her mother if it got
muddy.

'It's
not
nice
,' said Harry. 'He's paid to do it.'

'Keep
your voice down,' I said.

'Why?'
said Harry. 'It's fact.'

As
Mr Shannon came up, we all said, 'Good evening, Mr Shannon,' and he growled out
a 'Good evening' in return, which tickled me. He wasn't over-friendly, except
when he'd a drink taken, but even he couldn't ignore a greeting from three
people at once. He was an idle bugger into the bargain, and remained on his
bike as he lifted the pole up to the lonely gas lamp on the standard
over-opposite.

'Does
he bring the flame on the end of the stick?' asked Sylvia.

'You
know very well he doesn't,' said Harry.

'There's
a hook on the end of the pole,' I said. 'He uses it to push a switch. That sets
the gas flowing. Then he pulls a little chain with the hook, and that ignites
the gas.'

'Let's
watch,'
said Sylvia, as though what I'd just said wasn't really
true, and needed to be proved.

We
watched, and when he'd done, Shannon circled on his bike in the pool of white
light that he'd made, and set off back for Thorpe and, if I knew him, the
Fortune of War public house.

'I
love Mr Shannon,' said Sylvia as he wobbled off between the wide, darkening
fields.

'He's
quite useful about the village,' I said.

'That's
exactly what I mean,' said Sylvia.

'He
hasn't changed the water in the horse trough for a while,' said Harry. 'It's
all green.'

'How
does he take the
old
water out?' asked Sylvia.

'Harry?'
I said, turning to the boy. 'How does he do it?'

Harry
watched the gas lamp for a while, keeping silence.

'Not
sure,' he said, after a while.

'Perhaps
he drinks it,' said Sylvia, and she gave a quick little smile.

'That
might not be far off the mark,' I said, thinking of Shannon sinking his nightly
five pints of Smith's.

We
turned and walked back to the house, across our land, which we called 'the
meadow'. It smelt of cut grass just then because I'd gone at some of the taller
stuff with a scythe in my work suit only an hour before. The house was a long
cottage, half tumbled-down, but it was big, getting on for three times the size
of our old place on the main street of Thorpe. You could look at it as a
terrace of three with a barn or, with a bit of knocking-through, it would be
one good-sized cottage with built-on barn.

We
lived in four rooms at one end of it, but the whole thing was ours, and on the
day we'd moved in the wife had turned to me in our new parlour and said, 'Well,
Jim, we've got
on!

She
was before the house now, beating a Turkey carpet that hung from the washing
line. I had never seen that carpet before, but the house had come furnished,
and the wife was turning new things up every day.

'I
still can't believe it's our house,' said Sylvia as we came up.

'Well,
you can thank Mr Robert Henderson for that,' I said.

'He
must really like us,' said Sylvia.

'He
really likes mother,' said Harry, and I eyed him as we stopped to watch the
beating of the rug.

It
was true enough.

I
watched the wife beating away. With each stroke, a wisp of her brown hair flew
forwards, and she pushed it back behind her left ear. But her left ear was too
small to keep it in place. You'd think she'd have worked that out after thirty
years. As she went at it, the colour rose in her face - not to redness, but a
dark brown. I had often wondered whether there might have been a touch of the tar
brush in the wife's family, to account for the blackness of her eyes, and the
brownness that went all the way down. I thought of Harry's paper,
The Captain,
which he had on subscription every week, and how one
of the stories was 'Tales of the Far West'. There were Sioux Indians in these
tales and at odd times a Sioux squaw would appear, supposedly a different one
every time. But all of them looked like Lydia.

'Feel
free to just stand there gawping,' she said. 'Harry, you'll take the water up
for your sister's wash.'

Harry
went off to the copper in the scullery. He was good about helping around the
house. His main job was to look out for his sister. Their bedrooms were both at
the end of a long corridor, over the top of the in-built barn, and this made Sylvia
nervous, even though it was these two rooms that had decided us - or decided
the wife - to rent the house from Henderson at the knockdown rate of seven
shillings a week. It was the view over the fields that had done it. There was a
gas mantle in the corridor between the two rooms, and Sylvia believed that it
was kept on all night. But this was because she had never yet been awake beyond
eight o'clock. In fact, Harry was under orders to come out of his room and
switch it off at nine, after his hour of reading, which was often more than an
hour.

The
children went off through the opened front door, and I said to the wife, 'I'm
not sure you should be beating that carpet with washing still on the line.'

I
said that just to see the look she would give me, but she didn't take the bait.
Instead, still beating, she said, 'Mr Buckingham has been riding the railway
again.'

'Oh
Christ,' I said.

'On
his departure from the station -'

'Which
station?'

'Any
station ... He found that the carriage door had been left unfastened by the
company's servants ...'

'Which
company?'

'You
won't put me off... Mr Buckingham endeavoured to fasten the door himself,
and...'

Mr
Buckingham didn't exist but I could picture him quite easily. He had pop eyes,
a red face, and a thin moustache; he looked permanently put-out and was always
ready to fly into rage. He was smartly dressed, in clothes often dirtied by the
negligence of whatever railway company had the ill-luck to carry him, according
to terms and conditions that might or might not have been correctly set out or
somehow indicated on the backs of their tickets. He carried a portmanteau
(containing valuable items) which was regularly mislaid or damaged by the
company's servants. Everything he did was reasonable, or reasonably
foreseeable, or so he said, and everything the company did was unreasonable,
or so he also said.

'In
endeavouring to fasten the door,' said the wife, who had now left off beating
the carpet and was enveloping herself in linen as she took down the laundry,
'Mr Buckingham injured himself -'

'Seriously,
I hope.'

'And
he is contemplating suing. What are his prospects of success?'

The
wife said that last part with two clothes pegs in her mouth, and she now walked
to the laundry basket, which was over by the chicken run.

'This
is something to do with Adams versus the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway
Company, isn't it?' I said.

'It
might be,' the wife said, as she dropped the white sheets into the basket. Some
of them went in, and some went onto the bit of cinder track that skirted the
chicken run.

'Oh
heck,' said the wife.

She
was no great hand at housework, but she knew more about
An Introduction to Railway Law
by Harold Andrews - in which the
adventures of Mr Buckingham featured - than I did myself, which was a bad
look-out, since I was the one about to be tested. She picked up a tea towel
that had missed its mark, and tried to brush off the muck.

'I'd
say
that
was reasonably foreseeable,' I said.

'I
forgot to mention', said the wife, standing upright again, and turning to me,
'that Mr Buckingham attempted to close the door while the train was in motion,
and that there was a sign fixed to the door expressly forbidding opening or
closing it while the train is moving.'

'Right,'
I said.

'...
which Mr Buckingham didn't see.'

'Had
he been drinking, by any chance?' The wife glanced anxiously down again at the
basket, looked up at me, and brushed her hair behind her ear.

'Come
on, Jim,' she said. 'You're supposed to know this.' And her hair fell forward.

Now
York retreated at a great rate, and I was back in the coal cellar, which was
now rising bodily at speed. I was not rising in it, for the floorboards remained
the same distance from my face. I would be sick at the peak of the rise, I
knew; but when the peak was reached and the next fall began, I changed my idea:
I will be sick at the lowest point of the fall, I decided, but instead I turned
my head, finding once again a kind of coolness on the coals, and an easing of
the pain in my head as York came back.

There
came first scenes of the kind I'd once seen at the Electric Theatre with the
wife: the great cathedral, the gates of the city wall, only the pictures were
not moving, just as they had not moved at the Electric Theatre, except for
scenes of the river Ouse - or
some
such
moderately wide and dirty river - meant to suggest the passing of time. That
had not been enough for the wife, who had leant across to me, and said, 'Two
shillings for this, it's a swiz.' But the scenes showed that York was an
important place. Important and beautiful, and I ought not to have left it for
Scarborough.

I
saw in my mind's eye the mighty station waiting as the trains waited within it,
the notable churches of the city, and some of the very old buildings of the
centre. I saw a display of the new electric trams, and then I was with the
newest of them all, following the newest
route
of all. The
side of it said 'Singer's

Sewing
Machines' and the board fixed to the front said where it was going: the
terminus of Line Nine, the Beeswing Hotel.

That
had been the start of it all, but before that there'd been an earlier start. Of
course, this too had to be in York, for that was where
I
started.
But the outskirts ... and again I was back in Thorpe-on-Ouse.

When?
Some time before or after my journey to the Beeswing. No, it must have been
before. We were in the front parlour of our new house, which had several
parlours, depending on how you looked at it, but only one so far cosy. Again,
it was spring time: primroses in prospect - in the very air - but not yet
appeared.

And
the fire blazing in our new front parlour, rows of tins of paint lined up ready
near the door.

Thursday
12 March, 1914: in the National Gallery, London, the Rokeby Venus had been
attacked. The event was reported in the
Yorkshire Evening Press
and the account lay on the table between us. Mary Richardson, feminist and
suffragette, had gone at the painting so named with an axe. Earlier in the day,
Robert Henderson, who was the son of Colonel Robert Henderson, whose smooth
looks and smooth
name
I did not like, had stopped the wife in the high street of
Thorpe - stopped the wife, I stress. I, walking alongside her, he had quite
ignored.

'I
do not know the female equivalent of the word "confederate", Mrs
Stringer,' he had said.

'Nor
do I,' Lydia had said.

'But
your confederate, Miss Mary Richardson, has destroyed one of our greatest
paintings.'

'Has
she?' the wife had said, not yet having seen the
Press.

'The
report was in
The Times
this morning,' said Henderson.

'Which
painting was it?' enquired the wife. 'Just out of interest.'

'You
seem pretty sanguine about the whole business,' he'd replied. 'But then you are
part of the women's Co-operative Movement and you agitate on behalf of the
suffragettes.'

'Agitate!'
said the wife. 'I wouldn't know how to agitate if you paid me.'

'Oh,
I think you would,' he said, at which I had to cut in.