'Yes!' Amanda Rickerby said, very excited. 'Is there one running into Scarborough?'
'In summer there is,' I said.
'And might they do a little more than a tea? Not a joint but a chop or a steak?'
'I think so.'
'And a nice glass of wine? When does the first one run?'
'May sort of time,' I said, and she shut her eyes for a space, contemplating the idea.
'Cedar-wood box after luncheon, Mr Stringer?' Fielding called over to me.
I nodded back. 'Obliged to you,' I said.
Miss Rickerby was standing, leaning forward to pour me more wine, and she threatened to over-topple onto me, which I wished she would do.
'Care for another glass?' she enquired, sitting back down.
Vaughan gave a mighty sniff, and said, 'You ought to have asked that before you filled it, Miss R ... strictly speaking.'
But she ignored him in favour of eyeing me.
'Well, it goes down a treat,' I said.
'Just so!' said Fielding, and Aijianda Rickerby turned sharply about and looked at him.
'Are you married, Mr Stringer?' she said, facing me again - and I knew I'd failed to keep the look of panic from my face.
'Well...' I said again.
'Three wells make a river and you in the river make it bigger,' said Mrs Dawson from the pantry, where she was making a list. It was an old Yorkshire saying, but what did it mean, and what did she mean by it?
'You either are or you aren't,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'I mean, it ought not to require thought.'
I was fairly burning up with embarrassment. But Mrs Dawson had hardly looked up from her pencil and note pad while making her remark; Fielding was taking the corkscrew to another bottle; Adam Rickerby was stirring a pot; Theo Vaughan was biting his long thumbnail while reading, and the one little pointer on the gas meter that moved around fast was moving around just as fast as ever.
'No,' I said, 'I'm not,' and the cork came out as Fielding said, 'Oh dear.'
'What's up?' said Vaughan, looking up.
'It's corked,' said Fielding.
'It was,' said Vaughan, 'but now you've taken the cork out.'
'No, I mean the cork has crumbled,' said Fielding.
'What's the harm?' said Vaughan, turning the page of the paper. 'You weren't thinking of putting it back in, were you?'
'You don't seem to understand,' said Fielding.
I had betrayed Lydia my wife: our eleven years together, our children ... I told myself I'd done it in order to keep in with Miss Amanda Rickerby. I had done it for the sake of the investigation, and no other reason. She was on the marry and it was important for me to keep her interest in me alive in order to acquire more data. Amanda Rickerby was grinning at me, and I believed she knew. Yes, she knew all right.
I drained my glass, sat back and said, 'You say that Blackburn jumped into the sea, but would that really have killed him? Just to jump in off the harbour wall?'
'I'll tell you what it wouldn't have done, Jim,' said Vaughan, still looking over Sporting Life. 'It wouldn't have warmed him up:
'Lucifer matches, Mr Stringer,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'You can suck the ends and then you'll die. Perhaps he did that.'
'While he was bobbing about in the sea, you mean?' asked Vaughan. 'And you have to suck every match in the box, you know.' 'My dad', said Miss Rickerby, 'did it by drinking a bottle of spirits every day for forty years.'
'Yes, and you think on about that, Amanda dear,' said Mrs Dawson. 'I don't like to see wine on the table so early in the day.'
'It's a special occasion, Mrs Dawson,' said Amanda Rickerby, and she rose to her feet. With a special smile in my direction, she said, 'Won't be a minute,' and quit the room.
Theo Vaughan was still sticking his finger into the tin of Golden Syrup.
'I like treacle,' he said.
'Evidently,' Fielding put in.
'I like it on porridge,' said Vaughan.
'That would be sacrilege to the Scots,' said Fielding.
'If you put it into porridge,' said Vaughan, 'it allows you to see into the porridge.'
'Very useful I'm sure,' said Fielding.
'It goes like the muslin dresses of the ladies on the beach when the sun is low. They're sort of.'..'
'They are transparent, Vaughan,' said Fielding.
'Noticed it yourself, have you?'
'I have not!
'Mr Vaughan, please remember there are ladies present,' said Mrs Dawson. But in fact she herself was the only one in the room at that moment, and she was putting on her coat and gloves, at which I saw my opportunity.
'I'll show you to the door, Mrs Dawson,' I said. Once out in the hallway, I said, 'Very good house, this. It's a credit to you - and to the boy.'
'He's a bit mental, the poor lamb,' Mrs Rickerby said, fixing her wrap, 'but he does his best.' 'I'm thinking of trying to help him in some way. I know he has a strong interest in railways ..
She eyed me. The clock ticked. I couldn't keep her long, since she was evidently over-heating in her coat and wrap.
'I know he likes to read about them,' I said, 'or to be read to about them.'
'I've read to him on occasion,' said Mrs Dawson, 'when we've done our chores of a morning.'
'About what exactly?'
She kept silence for a moment, reaching for the latch of the door. I opened the door for her.
'Youth cut to death by express train,' she said. 'Collision in station, engine on platform. Driver killed, fireman scalded. Car dashes onto level crossing as train approaches... He knows his letters well enough to spot a railway item in the newspaper, and then everything has to stop while you read it out.'
'Why?'
'Why? It's just how he is. It's how his condition takes him. He's a very simple lad, is Adam. He has this house, which he tries to keep up. He did have Peter...'
'Peter?'
'His cat that died.'
The rain made a cold wind as it fell onto Bright's Cliff.
'... And he has his little boat,' Mrs Dawson added.
'Oh? Where's that?'
'Sometimes in the stables over the road, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in the harbour.'
'How does he move it about?'
'On a cart.'
'He goes in for a bit of sailing, does he?'
'It's a rowing boat.'
In the kitchen I'd thought Mrs Dawson a kindly woman, which perhaps she was, but she didn't seem to have taken to me and I wondered whether she was the first person in Paradise to have guessed that I was a spy. Or was it just that - being married herself and a woman experienced in the ways of men - she'd somehow known I was lying about not having a wife?
As Mrs Dawson stepped out into the rain, I heard a footfall on the dark stairs. Amanda Rickerby was coming down, and I returned with her in silence to the kitchen, which was a less homely place without Mrs Dawson. It was too hot and everyone looked red. Vaughan was moving some pots and pans aside so that he could get at the beer barrel again; Fielding remained with his back to the sink with arms folded and head down, evidently lost in a dream, but he looked up as we walked in, and Adam Rickerby approached his sister, carrying the fish in its baking pan.
She said, 'Oh dear, Adam love, it's over-cooked.'
She drew towards her another dish.
'The only thing for it,' she said, 'is to break it up, put it in this, and make a pie.'
'A pie?' he fairly gasped, and he looked all about in desperation. As he did so, it was Fielding's turn to quit the room. In the interval of his absence, Amanda Rickerby played with a salt cellar, completely self-absorbed, as it seemed to me; Vaughan pulled at his 'tache and read his paper, and Adam Rickerby fell to tidying the kitchen with a great clattering of crockery and ironmongery. When Fielding returned a few minutes later, the lad was arranging the objects on the table: he wanted the knife polisher in a line with the vegetable boiler, the toast rack, the big tea pot, and so on.
'Adam, love,' said his sister, 'don't t
ake on. I'm just going to ask Mr Stringer about summer trains, I'll see to the cooking in a moment.'
'It's too late,' he said. 'It'll be tea time any minute.'
'Well, stop moving things about, anyhow.'
'I en't movin' things about,' said Adam Rickerby. 'I'm movin' 'em back!
So saying, he walked directly through the door that gave onto the scullery, and I heard the opening and closing of a further door, indicating that he had gone into his own quarters at the back of the house.
'If luncheon is off then so am I,' said Vaughan, rising to his feet.
'Mr Stringer,' Fielding enquired from his post at the sink, 'will you come upstairs now for that cigar?'
And I somehow couldn't refuse him.
Chapter Thirty-Five
In the ship room the gas had not been lit, and the fire was low. Fielding, who entered in advance of me, was stirring it as I walked up to the left hand window and watched the storm. The wine and the earlier beer had made my head bad, and I had a half a mind to lift the sash and let in the wind and flying rain. I was in no mood for smoking a dry cigar but it would be a way of getting at Fielding. Or did he want to get at me?
He set down the poker and brought the cedar-wood box over. There were just two short cigars rolling about inside. The Spanish sherry, I noticed, was waiting on the small bamboo table. He poured two glasses, and we both drank. I saw for the first time that he wore a signet ring on his right little finger.
'Quite a panorama,' he said, indicating the window, 'as the post card people say.'
Has he brought me up to show me the view? I didn't want the sherry, but I drank the stuff anyway, as if doing so would bring the truth closer. But Fielding was only smiling politely. He seemed to have no topic for conversation in his mind.
'What ships do you see from here?' I asked, presently.
'Only this morning,' he said, 'one of Mr Churchill's destroyers.'
A noise came from the doorway, and Vaughan stood there in his Inverness cape, grinning with eyes half closed. He was thoroughly drunk by now and breathing noisily through his drooping moustache. He had not been invited, and I fancied that Fielding did not look too pleased to see him, although of course he kept up a show of politeness.
Vaughan closed on me with a post card held out. It might have been the woman earlier shown on the trapeze, only she now lounged under a tree, wearing no clothes as usual but holding a parasol, which would not have made her decent even if she'd chosen to use it for the purpose of keeping decent, which she had not done. Vaughan showed it only to me. There was evidently no question either of showing it to Fielding or of hiding it from him, but he could see it from where he stood, anyhow.
'Class A,' breathed Vaughan. 'Quite a naturalist, this one.'
'Naturist,' said Fielding, 'and be so good as to take her away'
Vaughan grinned, turned on his heel, and quit the room. Where was he going? Off to waste more of his allowance?
'I'm used to Vaughan's bohemian ways,' said Fielding, now pouring us out another glass each of the sherry. 'But it does you credit, Mr Stringer, the way that you take him in your stride.'
He sat down in his favourite chair, and I took the couch.
'I suppose they're only the Old Masters brought up to date,' I said, thinking of Vaughan's witness statement.
'It's not the highest sort of indecency,' said Fielding.
'The railway cards I liked though,' I said. 'It's not often you see a crossed signal or an out-of-gauge load on a card.'
'Something that might have appealed to a footplate man such as yourself, said Fielding, 'was our series of pictures of double headed trains.'
He was going round the houses; this surely was not meant to be the subject of our talk, but I said:
'You know there are triple-headed trains working in some places ... Up the bank to Ravenscar.'
'I shouldn't wonder,' said Fielding. 'What is it there? Six hundred feet above sea level?'
'Getting on for,' I said. 'They're very short trains too.'
'So you've a train with almost as many engines as carriages?' said Fielding, blowing smoke, and tipping his head to one side. He was full of little cracks like that. He moved his little glass from one hand to another, as though practising receiving a glass daintily with both hands. I wondered whether he'd worn that ring of his in York gaol. He'd have been asking for trouble if he had done. I was bursting to ask him whether he really had been lagged, because I could scarcely believe it.
'Vaughan's money came today, of course,' I said, after an interval of silence.
'Yes,' said Fielding. 'It's just enough to keep him idle. Some people might say that a modest allowance has promoted lethargy in my case as well, but I think I'm a little more industrious than friend Vaughan.'
'You've carried on various businesses,' I said.
'Yes,' said Fielding, exhaling smoke, 'but who was it said that the key to success is consistency to purpose?'
And he tipped his head, as though really expecting me to supply the answer.
'I don't know,' I said.
'Disraeli?' he said, and he smiled, adding, 'I should have stuck at my original plan.'
'Oh. What was that?'
'In my youth, I trained as a lawyer.'
'A solicitor?
He nodded again.
'I have it in mind to take articles myself,' I said, and he tipped his head. He did not believe me for a minute, or did not credit that it was possible.
'It's a hard road,' he said, and he left too long a silence before adding,'... but the work ought to be well within the capacities of a man like yourself.'
Fielding set out to be mannerly at all times, but occasionally he did not come up to the mark. I glanced over to see Amanda Rickerby in the doorway. She stood swaying somewhat, and said, 'There's a person to see you downstairs, Mr Fielding.'
He rose, half bowed at her, and went off through the open door of the ship room.
'Who was it?' I enquired of the landlady. But she walked to one of the two windows without replying.
'What a day,' she said, after a space. And then, remembering my question, 'It was someone from the gramophone society.'
She continued to stare out at the German Sea. Here was another of her silent goes; there'd been one during breakfast, and one in the kitchen not half an hour since. Was it the same thought every time that kept her silent? A ship putting out black smoke was stationary on the horizon. It might as well have been a factory at sea. Miss Rickerby turned and saw the decanter of Spanish sherry.
'Do you want a glass?' she said, moving fast towards it. 'Not that it's mine to offer.'
'Better not,' I said. 'I've just had two.'
She returned to the window with her glass, looking out to sea again. I stood by the next window, so that we were about three feet apart. I did not know what would happen, or what I would do. I was in fact paralysed by indecision, and so it was strange to see, down on the Prom, a tall, thin man moving with great purpose. He wore a Macintosh and a bowler, and was running at the top of his speed through the rain. He skidded up to the beach steps, half stumbled down them in his haste, and continued running over the black beach, going full pelt, heading straight for the waves, where he came to a sudden halt. Amanda Rickerby turned to me and smiled sadly.
'Well, I thought he was going to do ... something,' she said.
We faced each other now, and she took a step towards me, with face downturned. She was a head smaller than me, and I could see the top of her curls, and then, when she tilted her face upwards, the powder on her cheekbones, the blueness and greyness that made the overall greenness of her wide-set eyes.
'I am quite drunk, Mr Stringer,' she said.
She appeared to be looking at my North Eastern Railway badge again, really concentrating on it. She took my right hand in hers. Her hand was dry, and she moved it about over mine in a way that was somehow not restless but very calming - the right thing. I could hear footsteps on the stairs.
'You had better
lock your room tonight,' she said, quickly.
'Why?'
'Probably no reason,' she said, withdrawing her hand, and giving me a smile that was natural, quick, charming, and just about the most mysterious thing I've ever seen.
Adam Rickerby stood in the doorway.
'Gas 'as run out,' he said. 'Meter wants feeding.'
Amanda Rickerby smiled brightly and much more straightforwardly at me. 'Do you have sixpence, Mr Stringer? I'll pay you back later.'
Chapter Thirty-Six
Amanda Rickerby went downstairs in the company of her brother.
Events were now rushing on faster than my thoughts and faster also than my morals. What had she meant by advising me to lock my room? Did she mean that otherwise she would come to visit me in the night, and that she needed to be saved from herself? What was Vaughan up to? Mysterious and glooming in the seafront pub ... in better spirits during luncheon ... but now making off again. And for what purpose had Fielding taken me up to the ship room? But as I stepped out of that room, one thing was certain: I was alone on the first floor of the house, and both Fielding's and Miss Rickerby's bedroom doors stood open.
I walked into Fielding's first; I hardly cared if I was discovered. In fact being discovered might save me from myself. It was a big room, papered in plain green with a red border, better kept than the rest of the house, and very calm and neat, and made more so by the sight of the lashing rain and wild dark sea beyond the two windows. There were red rugs on wide black boards of the kind seen in inns, bookshelves in alcoves. You had to look hard to see the blisters in the wallpaper and the fraying in the carpet, for the gas was not lit, nor was the fire. There were two closets, a tall chest of drawers, a folded table and a smaller table by the bed head with a little drawer set into it. Over the fancy ironwork of the fireplace was a painting of a ship foundering. I fixed my eye on the chest of drawers, and I marched over the carpet towards it, feeling sure they must have heard the drumming of my boot heels on the floor below.
On the top of the chest of drawers lay an ebony tray with hair brushes and a shoe horn. I reached out with two hands, and pulled open the top drawer to its fullest extent. A smell of coal tar soap came up. The drawer contained a quantity of Howard Fielding's under-clothes neatly folded, and many little boxes. With Fielding, it seemed that almost everything came in boxes. There were several round collar boxes, and I quickly lifted the lids of two. They contained collars. I then lifted the lid of a green velvet-lined one. The inside of the lid was white silk, and the words 'Best Quality' were written there. It held solitaires and cuff links. A tortoiseshell one held more cuff links and Fielding's collection of stick pins and tie clips.
The Last Train to Scarborough Page 20
