Nobody walked the Prom; the lighthouse was dark; the two carriages of the funicular railway stood dangling out of reach, neither up nor down; each of the three hundred and sixty-five rooms of the Grand Hotel - one for every day of the year - stood empty, and drifting black smoke had possession of the town. The sea had come all the way up to the railway station. It was exploring the excursion platforms and the engine shed beyond. I saw the wax doll in the lavender room, the blue flame of the paraffin heater, and a paper fan that, when folded out, revealed a painting of a sea-side town that was not Scarborough but showed Scarborough up, put it to shame, this one being sunlit, with handsome people walking along a pretty promenade, and a light blue sea beyond.
All at once I was there, with my own wife and my new wife, who chatted away merrily, which I knew to be wrong, and which did cause me anxiety, but I put it from my mind for I was away from Scarborough in an altogether better sea-side spot, at least for a while. Scarborough waited for me, however, and I knew I would have to go back there, to examine the disaster that had befallen the place and to account for it and to answer for it.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Walking down the stairs towards the comfortable landing with my boots in my hand, I revolved the words of Theo Vaughan. Were they true? He must know that I could hardly check by asking Fielding himself.
He had, according to Vaughan, been lagged for raising funds for a publishing company that didn't exist. It went down as fraud. It hadn't been such a great amount of money, and it had all been repaid so he'd only got three months. Vaughan had once had the newspaper clipping that told the whole tale, but he'd lost it (which went a little way to his credit, I thought, since it seemed to mean he didn't have a plan to use the information, but would just blurt it out as the fancy took him).
The prison sentence explained Fielding's presence in Paradise, according to Vaughan. He'd always been keen on the sea, and had come to Scarborough to catch his breath after the shock. He found the house to his liking, if a little low class, and had taken it in hand; set himself to raising the tone with fancy recipes, a few sea paintings here and there, cigars in the ship room, sherry in the evenings. He'd put some money into the house too, and was largely paying the cost of the redecoration of the second floor, for the prosecution had not finished him financially speaking.
I approached the kitchen, and the door was on the jar, letting me see the long table. All the items upon it were a bit better ordered now, and stood in a row: knife polisher, big tea pot, vegetable boiler, corkscrew, toast rack, two dish covers. The kitchen had been cleaned, and the supper things put away. Adam Rickerby had done it, I knew. He liked things orderly. That youth now sat at one end of the table, applying Melton's Cream to a pair of women's boots - his sister's evidently - and she was reading to him from a newspaper with a glass of red wine at her elbow. She was certainly a little gone with drink, but she spoke very properly.
'Interview with foreign secretary,' she read, and took a sip of the wine. 'Sir Edward Grey had an interview with Mr Asquith at 10 Downing Street this morning ...'
'Where?' her brother asked, quite sharply, as though the matter was of particular importance to him.
'10 Downing Street,' his sister repeated, before carrying on reading. 'The interview was unusually prolonged. Sir Edward Grey remained at 10 Downing Street for just over an hour and a half.'
She turned the page of the paper, and Adam Rickerby sat back and thought about what he'd heard for a moment. He then took up a brush, and began polishing the boot, saying, 'Any railway smashes?'
'No,' his sister replied very firmly.
'Runaway trams?' he enquired, with spittle flying.
'Nothing of that kind,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'How lovely to see our Mr Stringer,' she ran on, looking up at me. But as I walked over to her brother and handed him my boots, she turned two pages of the paper in silence.
I heard soft footsteps behind me. They belonged to Fielding, who was approaching in dressing gown and slippers with his own boots in his hand.
'Have you been to Eastbourne, Mr Stringer?' Miss Rickerby asked, looking up from her paper as I gave my boots to the boy.
'Eastbourne in Sussex?' I enquired.
'Well, I don't think there's another.'
'Is there something about it in the paper?'
'Are you avoiding my question?' she asked. She smiled, but looked tired.
'I've never been there,' I said. 'I just wondered why you mentioned it.'
Fielding, having given his boots to the boy, was lifting the kettle that sat on the range, pouring boiling water into a cup and stirring.
'Ovaltine,' he said, seeing me looking on. 'Would you care for a cup, Mr Stringer?'
'Oh, no thanks.'
The stuff was meant to bring on sleep, and Fielding must have made it every night, for Miss Rickerby paid him no mind as he went about it. She said, 'Eastbourne is the one place I prefer to Scarborough, Mr Stringer.'
'Well, I wouldn't know,' I said, and then I thought of something clever to add: 'But this is Paradise. How can there be any advance on that?'
'Oh, I should think there could be,' she said. 'Probably quite easily.'
Adam Rickerby was polishing Fielding's boots, going at them like billy-o.
'Don't denigrate the house, Miss R,' said Fielding, with the cup in his hand. 'Eastbourne is fine though.'
'Told you,' Amanda Rickerby said, addressing me.
'Debussy wrote La Mer at the Grand Hotel there,' said Fielding, and since he was addressing me particularly I nodded back, in a vague sort of way. 'Then again it's a shingle beach and you can't sit on it... Good night all, and batten down the hatches. We're in for a storm, I believe. You should take a look at the size of the waves getting up just now, Mr Stringer.'
He quit the room, and I too made towards the door when Amanda Rickerby spoke.
'It's late, Mr Stringer,' she said, looking sadly down at her wine glass. 'I believe that Sunday has already gone.' And then, in a glorious moment, she raised her eyes to mine: 'Have you had your treat yet?'
'I had a bottle of beer in Mr Vaughan's room. Does that count?'
'I'm not at all sure that it does.'
'Have you had yours?'
'No.'
'Well then,' I said, 'that makes two of us.'
I glanced over at Adam Rickerby, who'd finished my first boot. What he made of this exchange between a near-stranger and his sister I could hardly imagine. He was polishing hard.
'I'm obliged to you for doing that,' I called across to him.
'I'll bring 'em up in t'morning,' he said, not looking up.
I walked through the doorway, and Amanda Rickerby rose from her seat and followed. She wasn't done with me yet, and I knew I was red in the face.
'When you go to bed, Mr Stringer...'
'Yes?' I said.
'Oh ... nothing.'
She wore an expression that I could not understand.
'Why does your brother want to know about railway smashes?' I whispered, after a space.
'Oh just... morbid interest.'
'I could tell him a few tales,' I said.
'You've caused a few smashes yourself, I dare say,' she said, looking up at me and shaking her hair out of her eyes.
'In a roundabout way,' I said.
'You hardly know whether to claim credit for them or not.'
I was for some reason lifting my hand, which might have gone anywhere and done anything at that moment; might have stroked her amazing hair or pressed down on her bosom. But in the end it landed on my collar, and gave a tug for no good reason apart from the fact that the whole house was overheated.
'Any road ...' I began, and I heard the wife's voice, saying, 'Don't say that, Jim, it doesn't mean anything.'
'Will you be staying with us tomorrow night?' asked Amanda Rickerby.
'Depends on the engine,' I said. 'But it might come to that.'
'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.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
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.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
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 cou
ld 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.
The Last Train to Scarborough Page 16
