The Last Train to Scarborough (25 page)

'Good,'
she said. 'Good
night,
I mean,' she added, with a very fetching smile, and I felt
both an excitement and a kind of relief that anything that was going to happen
between us had been put forward to another day. When I walked into the hallway,
I saw Fielding, lingering there apparently adjusting the coats on the stand,
and I was glad I'd kept my pocket book and warrant card in my suit pocket. He
left off as I approached, and climbed the stairs at a lick.

I
dawdled up, thinking of the wife and Amanda Rickerby, weighing the two in the
balance. Neither was very big on housework but in the wife's case that was
because she was too busy doing other things. I couldn't imagine Amanda Rickerby
in the suffragettes, as the wife was. She couldn't be bothered. Was she on the
marry? She certainly acted like it, and I felt guilty for not letting on that I
already had a wife.

Had
she been the same with Blackburn? He'd evidently been a good-looking chap .. .
But surely a woman who owned a house as big as Paradise would want more than a
railway fireman.

.
. . And what had she meant to say to me about going to bed?

Had
she proposed joining me?

As
I came up to the undecorated landing, I thought with anxiety of the wife,
calling to mind the Thorpe-on-Ouse fair of the previous summer. It had been
held on Henderson's meadow by the river. Robert Henderson and Lydia had
coincided more than once there, and he'd as good as forced Jack Silvester, who
kept the village grocery, and was a tenant of the Henderson family, to give her
a prize at hoop-la even though her hoop had not gone over the wooden base on
which the prize - a jar of bath crystals - had stood. Silvester had called out,
'Oh, bad luck!' and then immediately met the hard eye of Henderson. The wife
was always going on about the condescension of men to women, and here was a
very good example of it, as I had later told her. The crystals were not
rightfully hers; she ought not to have taken them. Instead, she would soak for
what seemed like hours before the parlour fire in the perfumed baths the
crystals made. Lily of the Valley - that was the scent, supposedly. The stopper
had come wrapped about with ribbon, and the wife had carefully replaced that
ribbon after every use of the crystals.

She'd
told me that she couldn't believe she'd gone all these years with un-scented baths,
so perhaps it was the crystals themselves and not a matter of who had been
responsible for her getting them. Her plan was to get on, and I believed on balance
that she was determined to pull me up with her, and not run off with Henderson.
She surely wouldn't have made such a great effort into making a trainee lawyer
of me if she meant to clear off.

I
always knew what the wife wanted, and sometimes our marriage came down to
nothing
but
the question of what she wanted. But what did Amanda Rickerby
want? On all available evidence, me in her bed or her in mine, but I could
hardly believe that was right. Her approaches were too direct. Women went round
the houses when they wanted to fuck someone.

I
lay on my own narrow bed at the top of the house. I'd kept the window open, and
the scene beyond was now illuminated by the flashing of the lighthouse, which
seemed to light up the whole empty horizon for hundreds of miles, the light
then dying away raggedly like a guttering candle. With each successive flash,
the sea seemed to boil more violently.

The
fire - lit, as I supposed, by Adam Rickerby - burned two feet away from my bed
and it made the room too hot like the rest of the house. I turned on my side and
watched the line of white light under the closed door - for the gas in the
little hallway still burned - and I thought of Fielding. Well, it stood to
reason
that he was an ex-convict. An apparent gent living permanently in a Scarborough
boarding house would have to be in queer somehow even if he wasn't broke, and
he certainly didn't seem to be that. He was one of those free-floating businessmen
who lived by a series of schemes, and that sort often did pretty well even
though the schemes never came to anything.

I
ran through some motives for murder - with which the house was fairly bursting.
Adam Rickerby was generally nuts, and would defend the house at all costs.
Fielding's post card company had been given the chuck by the North Eastern
Railway, and he was a man with a past. Had Blackburn known him in Leeds, and
been threatening to talk out of turn about him? Fielding wouldn't want the
Recorded Music Circle to know he was a convicted fraudster - that'd put a crimp
into his social life, all right.

Vaughan
was a dirty dog in all respects, and was either honest and open with it, or a
splitter who had something to hide. He paid lip service to the idea that
Blackburn had made away with himself. But he also seemed to keep trying to drop
Fielding in it, and he'd begun pointing the finger at Adam Rickerby into the
bargain. The business of the signalling out to sea: why would Rickerby do that?
His chief concern as far as I could see was sticking to the bloody meal times.
Was Vaughan really trying to put the knock on Adam Rickerby? But he'd as good
as put himself on the spot at the same time. By letting on that he'd shown the
special range of cards to Blackburn, he was admitting to acting in a way that a
sober-sided man like that could easily take against.

Amanda
Rickerby? She was mysterious all-round, and she too might well have something
to keep from the world at large. She drank, for starters; she was
anti-religious where Blackburn had been a bible thumper, and she was funny
about the rent. She was, or had been, short of money. She was up to something,
anyhow.

I
rolled over to the other side and looked at the fire, noticing that it was
starting to smoke a little. I climbed out of bed, picked up the water jug that
stood by the wash stand, and dashed a pint or so onto the red coals. The sound
was tremendous. How a fire protested when you did that! I was replacing the
water jug when my toe scraped against something in the floorboards. Looking
down, I could make nothing out, so I edged along by the bed until I came to the
table where the oil lamp and matches sat. I lit the lamp, carried it back over,
and set it down. A short length of lead tube - about a quarter inch worth -
stuck up. It was the top of one of the two gas pipes that rose up beyond the
lamps in the room of Theo Vaughan: the stub that had remained after the gas
pipe (and gas
light)
in my own room had been removed. Gas would naturally rise
to the top of any vertical pipe, but this stub had been nipped tightly shut
with a pair of pliers to stop any escape and, leaning closer, I could detect
no gas smell from it. Lead, being soft, is easy to nip in that way and I was
satisfied that a perfect seal had been made.

I
lifted the lamp to the other side of the hearth, and there was the second
outcropping of pipe. It too was tightly sealed and gave off no smell. I
returned the lamp to the table, blew it out, lay back in my bed, and listened
for footsteps on the stairs. I heard the chimney flute note at one o'clock by
my watch, and again at four, and I don't believe I slept in all that time but
just revolved endlessly the mysteries of Paradise while trying to anticipate
the surges of the sea wind against the window. As I lay on the bed I had mostly
faced the door but, on hearing the chimes of five rise up from the Old Town, I
decided the worst of the night was finished, turned over to face the wall
rather than the door, and fell asleep amid the dawn cries of seagulls.

I
awoke and lifted my hand to the back of my head. A delicate sea shell, a fine
crab shell perhaps, seemed to hang in my hair. I could not quite trust my hand,
for it was made nerveless by cold, but the thing seemed to be at the same time
part of me, and not part of me. I tried to tug at the thing, and it both
cracked and melted. I brought my hand down, and there was a sticky dampness to
it. I could not make out its colour but I knew it to be blood; when dampness
comes out of nowhere it is generally safe to assume the worst - to assume that
it is blood.

My
headache was no worse, anyhow. If anything, I fancied that it was easing, and
it had been a while since I'd had one of the electrical flashes. But I wanted
badly to get warm. I sat up and put the oilskin more tightly around me. The
rise and fall of the ship had become a gentle rocking, a soft swinging, nurserylike.
I thought of the wife. Was it true, as I suspected, that she would no longer
carry her basket down the main street of Thorpe-on-Ouse in case Robert
Henderson should see her about her marketing, and think her low class for not
having a servant to do it for her? I could picture Lydia very clearly both with
and without basket in the middle of Thorpe, which was proof that my memory was
returning. It also seemed to me that there was nothing to choose between the
two mental pictures. I had been a fool to fret about Henderson - my anxiety
had come from having no graver matter to worry about. I would go back to Thorpe
and I would have it all out with Lydia, and if it came to it I would go up to
his big house with the stone owl sitting over the door, and I would clout
Henderson. Furthermore, I would not be a solicitor, because I did not want to
be
a solicitor. Even at thirty I was too old and the change of
life was too great, and the lawyers were at the shameful end of railway work.
It seemed to me, as I sat in that rolling black iron prison, that I had gone to
Paradise looking for trouble and hardly wanting to come back because my future,
although apparently promising, had been taken out of my own hands. But I
would
return to York and I
would
reclaim my
future, and if I didn't then I would take a bullet, and there would be nothing
between these two outcomes of my present fix.

...
Yet while the image of Lydia in Thorpe
was clear in my mind, I could still not recall the end of my time in Paradise;
and how could my future be contemplated until I had done that? My memory of the
final events was lost in a jumble of over-heated rooms propped high above a
black sea - a sea that was never still, but that came on in a way somehow
un-natural, like a crawling black field.

I
lay still; began once more to shiver. I might have slept again in spite of the
shivering, and presently, there came a disturbance in the iron room. I could
not say what had caused it, but something had changed. All was still again, and
I kicked out at the nearest chain link, and it was as though the thing had
nerves and had taken umbrage at this, for the part that ran up through the hole
shivered for a second, and then the great snake began racing upwards through
that hole, making a breakaway with a tremendous, deafening roar that forced me
to clap my hands to my ears and move to the furthest corner of my cell.

When
I awoke the lighthouse beam was off, and all was grey along the front. Throwing
the bed clothes aside and moving rapidly towards the window I thought some
calamity had occurred, but it was just an early winter's morning in
Scarborough. There came a knock at the door.

'Yes,'
I said.

'Yer
tea,' said Adam Rickerby.

'Morning,'
I said, opening the door - and he passed me an enamel tray with tea things set
out on it. My boots, highly polished, were strung by the laces about his neck.
These he set down just inside the door, together with a big jug of hot water
for shaving. He'd carried the tray in one hand, and the jug in the other. He
was dressed as before, in the long apron, but his hair had grown a little
wilder in the night.

'Do
you know what time it is?' I enquired.

'I
bring t'tea at seven o'clock.'

I
had forgotten our arrangement.

'You
bring the tea at seven, therefore it
is
seven o'clock,'
I said, putting the tray down on the bed.

'Put
it on t'table,' he said, and just for a quiet life I did so.

'Did
you
sleep well?' I enquired, because I was determined to discover
more about this queer bloke.

'I've
ter be off down now,' he said. 'I've t'breakfasts to do.'

I
had a topping sleep,' I said,'... only the fire smoked a little.' 'I'll tek a
broom 'andle ter t'chimney,' he said.

'Do
you know why it smoked?'

'Gulls,'
he said. 'They nest in chimneys.'

'But
it's only March,' I said.

'...
Don't follow yer,' he said.

'Gulls
don't nest until April or so. I was born in a sea-side town so I know.'

He
eyed me for a while.

'Could
be last year's,' he said, very rapidly.

'But
has no-one else complained of a smoking chimney in this room? Did the fellow
Blackburn not complain?'

'Who?'

'Blackburn.
You might remember him. He was the one that vanished into thin air while
staying here.'

"E
did not.'

'Didn't
vanish?'