A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Usually the ten-twenty-three from Middlesbrough to Scarborough and the three-oh-nine back. You weren’t one of our passengers, were you?’

  ‘That would be one of Worsdell’s oh-six-ohs, with Tubby Drake or old Hackby driving,’ she said.

  ‘Harry Hackby . . . How on earth . . . ?’

  ‘Daddy’s loony about railways. All the parsons I’ve met are loony about something. You couldn’t have known. He’s got his own locomotive—an incredibly ancient Whitby Bogey four-four-oh built by Fletcher—you’re supposed to say Great Scott!’

  ‘Great Scott! Why?’

  ‘It’s the last one left. It should have gone to the breakers years ago. It’s had about three new boilers.’

  ‘Does it still go?’

  ‘Oh yes. There’s a private spur line in the valley which used to serve an old gravel pit. He keeps it in the shed there and drives it up and down the spur. The choirs in our churches come for outings and he takes them for rides, but what he really ioves is a dock strike, because then there aren’t any goods trains running on the main line between the midnight mail and the milk train, and he goes for what he calls night runs, all the way up to Selby.’

  ‘They let him?’

  ‘It’s a wangle. Mummy’s got a lot of shares, you see. She’d be on the board if she was a man. Daddy pulls a van with some instruments in it and pretends he’s testing the track, but I don’t think they pay any attention, really, when he sends the reports in. Anyway, that’s how I know about trains. You see, he always rides on the footplate of any train he catches if the drivers will let him, and they usually do, even the London expresses. He used to take me on the local stoppers when I was little. He loves your line—all that reversing at Guisborough and Whitby, and the bell on the Staithes Viaduct. That’s where I met old Hackby.’

  ‘I see.’

  It seemed incredible that she should have ridden on the same juddering footplate. He wasn’t at all sure that the coincidence was a good omen. It seemed such a world away from the hill above Hendaye, and the butterflies.

  ‘Did you do any shunting?’ she said.

  ‘I watched it being done. I didn’t do much driving, as a matter of fact—I couldn’t afford to seem too anxious. I think I could take a train out now along a fairly straightforward line, but shunting looks tricky.’

  ‘Yes, it is. Daddy does it, down in the docks, of course, where the tracks belong to us and they can’t really stop him.’

  ‘He must be good.’

  ‘Qh, yes, he’s good at that. Of course, that’s why they both wanted me to be a boy, Mummy because of the ships, and Daddy because of the railway engines.’

  The waitress came back with a pot of tea, a plate of steaming toast sliced into triangles, and a wickerwork tray of fancy cakes for Tom to choose from. Without thought he reached for the least fanciful, a plain rock cake knobbed with a few charred raisins.

  ‘No,’ said Judy. ‘They’re quite good but ordinary. Is there one of those yellow ones with a twirl of cream and a nut on top. Yes, there! Have that one, Tom. They’re special.’

  ‘Why don’t you have it?’

  ‘I daren’t any more. It’s so unfair. When I was fourteen I could have eaten six of them and not got any fatter, but now . . . I ordered toast because I knew I wouldn’t want to eat it. It doesn’t seem fair just to order tea. No, really I won’t.’

  She smiled with such friendliness at the waitress that she conjured an answering smile from the drawn and listless face. The girl poured a cup of tea for Tom and moved away, going out through the shadowy door beyond a rank of gleaming brass bed-warmers that ornamented the inner wall.

  ‘That’s a good omen about the cakes,’ she said. ‘I was worried because the waitress is different, but the cakes are still the same. I haven’t been here for . . . What’s fourteen from twenty-six?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Twelve years then. A bit less than that, I suppose, because the War had just begun so it must have been autumn. I had a new Nanny who’d come to us from a family near Haughton. Mummy would never let any of my Nannies stay for more than a couple of years in case I got too fond of them. This one was young and pretty, and once a week when she was supposed to be taking me for a walk a car would be waiting at the bend of the road where it couldn’t be seen from the Lodge gates and we’d get in and the man would drive us down here and he and Nanny would hold hands and whisper while I ate as many cakes as I could stuff into myself. I sort of half understood, but not really. I knew he wasn’t a servant, or anything like that. In fact he was the father of the family she’d come from—she’d had to leave because his wife had found out about them and made him sack Nanny and promise never to see her again, but he’d managed to find her this job near enough for him to drive over once a week. It didn’t last, of course. His wife found out again. She must have been a silly woman because she forced him to choose and he chose Nanny. He was going to marry her, but he got killed somewhere before he could. That’s how I know it must have been just when the war was beginning. The wife had written to Mummy of course, so Nanny had left us by then. I don’t know what happened to her. She was only with us a few months, but . . . I’m telling you this, Tom, because I want you to understand. This is a between place for me.’

  ‘Between?’

  ‘There are places where you do your living, where things happen that belong together and add up in a way you can’t get away from. Most places are like that. But there are a few between places, which aren’t part of that sum at all. Do you see?’

  ‘I half see, I think. I’m not sure I live my life quite like that.’

  ‘But you understand that I do? It’s important, Tom.’

  ‘I understand that it’s important. But you’ll have to explain a bit more. For instance, was Bertie’s . . . ?’

  ‘Oh no! If you thought that you wouldn’t understand at all! Hendaye wasn’t, even before . . . They aren’t like that, you see. They’re small and secret and either nobody knows you’re there or nobody knows who you are. You can’t make them up. You can’t say “This is going to be a between place from now on.” You can only find them by accident and realise what they are. This one . . . perhaps it was because it mattered so much to Nanny Brice and the man, it can’t matter to anyone else . . .’

  ‘Yes, I see. But I know who you are. Why did you ask me to meet you here? Hasn’t that got to be part of the sum?’

  ‘I don’t know—I haven’t tried this before—using one, I mean—taking it out of between . . . oh, Tom, I wanted to talk to you, but it had to be outside anything that’s happened, or anything that’s going to happen.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me you made a mistake?’

  ‘Oh, no! But Tom, I want . . . I want to change the rules of the game. I know that’s cheating when we’ve already started, but . . . you do see, don’t you?’

  ‘What are the new rules?’

  ‘Well . . . we met at Bertie’s. We won the foursome. We drove up into the hills and watched the sunset. We canoodled a bit in the car coming back. Perhaps we’d have fallen properly in love in a few more days, but you got a wire from your father and had to come home. That’s all. They’re quite easy rules.’

  ‘Easy to understand. Difficult to play.’

  She did not answer. He looked at her, but though she met his gaze directly he could read nothing in her eyes, nothing but candour, colourless as air. Her brow was perfectly smooth—what he could see of it under the dark brown cloche—and her lips were a little open, but not to speak or smile. His own mouth, though empty, seemed coated with greasy pulp, and as he looked away he saw that he had been absently munching at the toast the waitress had brought him. One triangle was gone, and the next was in his hand with a moon-shaped bite chewed from it. He put the fragment back on his plate and fretted the tips of his fingers together to rub the melted butter away. Beside that plate was the cake she had made him choose. The crinkled paper cake-cup held a little turret of amazingly yellow sponge, roofed with a ba
roque twirl of cream with a filbert for finial. It seemed to bulk very large in his vision, though at the same time he was seeing it from a distance as remote as lies between mountains. A hand, his own, moved into the patch of vision, picked up a knife and neatly cut the cake in two. Normal seeing and feeling came back to him as he pushed the plate across to her and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I think Nanny Brice’s dead friend would like you to have some,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not fair, bringing him in! . . . But all right. You can keep the nut. It’s the way the cream goes with the sponge that matters.’

  They ate their halves in silence. The sponge was flavoured with orange and with something else he couldn’t put a name to, and was extraordinarily light. Without the cream it would have been textureless. She tilted her head to one side as she ate her last mouthful, waiting for his judgment.

  ‘I’d never have guessed to look at it,’ he said.

  ‘You haven’t eaten the nut.’

  ‘No. If you don’t, I don’t.’

  ‘All right.’

  They were silent again. She began to smile in what he was learning was a characteristic way, self-pleased but oddly mocking—so characteristic, indeed, that it was hard to tell whether it was a signal of some inward thought or a meaningless mannerism. He guessed that the main purpose of their meeting was over, that the ‘rules’ had been amended and agreed, and that to ask or even to hint at asking whether what the rules governed was no more than a game would be to break those rules. This did not seem to him unfair. If Father had not sent that wire, forcing her hand . . .

  ‘Why trains?’ she said, suddenly.

  He felt his eyes widen.

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t think I’m loony about trains too,’ she said. ‘In fact I think they’re rather a bore. I just know about them because I can’t help it, Daddy being Daddy. It seems a funny thing to come home for. I suppose it’s so you can help when they have this strike Mummy keeps talking about.’

  ‘That’s right. That’s why I had to make out to Harry Hackby and the others that I wanted to ride on footplates for the thrill of it. I don’t think Harry believed me, but he’s not that keen on a strike so the pretence was enough.’

  She nodded.

  ‘How soon is all this going to happen?’ she asked.

  ‘Next month, if it happens at all.’

  ‘You’ll have to come back from Oxford.’

  ‘I don’t know. I might find something useful to do down there. I must say, I hope it doesn’t happen. With a bit of luck I’m in line for a First and I want to try and make sure of it. Time’s awfully short, and I’d planned to use every minute of it, working like blazes.’

  ‘But you’ll get it easily, won’t you? You’re the cleverest person I’ve ever met!’

  She was staring at him, almost amazed. Her reaction seemed wholly straightforward, with none of the play-acting the ‘rules’ had seemed to demand. For the first time he realised that despite the glamour of her life—travel, and the smartest dances in the season, and familiarity with a dozen night-clubs in London and Paris, and clothes that would have cost him a whole year’s allowance—her world was in other ways extremely limited. He did not think of himself as specially clever. In his first year at Eton he had been sent up to the Lower Master for Good Work, He could remember now the long pale face under the mortar-board scanning in a few seconds down his carefully re-copied set of elegiacs, and the rather automatic nod of approval. ‘Boys are learning-machines, and you seem to be an efficient one,’ the Lower Master had said. Tom still thought it a fair summary, if brusque. When he considered the brilliant men he met every day at Oxford . . .

  ‘That can’t be true,’ he said, laughing because the idea was too absurd even to be embarrassing. ‘You’ve met Bertie Panhard, for instance.’

  ‘He’s not clever!’

  ‘He only pretends not to be, and I must say he took me in. But Father said something and since then I’ve been thinking . . . Bertie’s a good bit cleverer than I am in a lot of ways.

  ‘Will your father drive a train?’ he asked. ‘If there’s a strike, I mean?’

  Evidently she did not like the idea. She frowned, poured herself another cup of tea, tasted it, made a moue, put the cup down.

  ‘Oh no. He might do some shunting down inside the docks, hut he wouldn’t dream of doing anything to upset the N.E.R. drivers. They really hate strike-breakers, even the men who didn’t want to go on the strike in the first place. I’m afraid old Hackby won’t speak to you afterwards if he learns you’ve been a black-leg.’

  ‘I’m not going to let on I drove his line, so with luck I won’t get sent there. You know a lot about the working classes, Judy.’

  ‘Oh, I have to. It’s the docks, you see. We’ve got a real gang of Bolshies down there, and a lot of rows between union men and the others. They’ll go on strike about anything, and what’s more their women will back them up. There’s an extraordinary girl called Kate Barnes who’s as red as red can be. She goes to the mass meetings and climbs onto the platform and yells at the men to fight the bosses, and they cheer her like a football crowd. She’s only a few years older than me, too. I’ve never been to a meeting, but I admire her like anything. Mummy won’t let us mention her name at home, you know.’

  While she was speaking she pushed her crockery a little to one side, stubbed out her cigarette in the ash-tray and put the holder away.

  ‘Shall I see you?’ he said.

  ‘This is a between place, Tom. You don’t make plans here.’

  ‘Let’s go outside.’

  ‘Remember we’ve changed the rules. A chap in your position would probably write to a girl he’d met and ask her to a Commem Ball, don’t you think? I went to the House last year—it was fun.’

  ‘What would the girl do?’

  ‘She might say yes at once. But if she’s got any sense she’ll wait a couple of weeks and see what other invitations she gets.’

  ‘Not very sporting.’

  ‘Very sporting indeed. For all the chap knows she may have had some invitations already.’

  Her eyes flickered a little to one side. He turned and saw that the waitress was hovering by the bed-warmers. At his nod she came over with the bills.

  Outside on the pavement the afternoon was bright and warm, the air still faintly scented with the passage of the sheep.

  ‘I didn’t spot the Frazer-Nash,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, I leave that in France. It’s such a bother taking it to and fro. That’s mine. It’s a bit staid, because sometimes I have to take Mummy for drives.’

  She pointed to a silver limousine parked in the shadow of the church—a Lagonda two-litre, he thought, the rectangular propriety of windscreen and roof at odds with the dashing length of bonnet.

  ‘Where are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Over there.’

  Suddenly and for the first time with her ill at ease about such matters, he pointed at the Daimler.

  ‘Heavens!’ she said. ‘That! I thought somebody must have come with a choir outing!’

  ‘Choir outings seem to play a big part in your life.’

  ‘Of course they do. We’ve got four churches in Hull, as well as Brantingham. Did it get you here all right, Tom? It looks antediluvian!’

  ‘Oh, it purrs along—Pennycuick looks after it beautifully, and really it’s not all that old—Father bought it just before the war. I don’t have a car of my own. My grandfather made a complete mess of things, so now there isn’t all that money to spare.’

  ‘What rotten luck . . . That could make things a little bit dicey, Tom.’

  4

  Oxford, 27th April, 1926

  ‘MORE FIZZ, TOM?’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve got a tute at eleven.’

  ‘Is that some kind of medical treatment?’ said Bertie, still proffering the bottle.

  ‘It is a very old-fashioned cure for the disease of ignorance,’ said Dick Standish. ‘Primitive homeopathy, you might say. Tom has to r
ead an essay to his tutor at eleven, for which purpose he requires to remain elevated, but not sozzled.’

  ‘Better stick to coffee then,’ said Bertie, swapping the jug for the bottle. ‘What about you, Woffles? Don’t imagine you’ve got an essay to read.’

  ‘Wrong there,’ said Woffles Belford, a little over-dignified with drink. ‘I’ve got a top-hole essay and I’m going to read it to my tutor tonight. Can’t remember what it’s about at the moment—I’ve found a brainy little blighter in Wadham who’s got exactly the hang of what I want—last fellow used to put in a lot of names I couldn’t pronounce.’

  ‘What’s the going rate?’ asked Bertie.

  ‘I pay this new fellow a fiver a time.’

  ‘Going to ask him to take a cut in wages?’ asked Dick. ‘It seems to be the patriotic thing these days.’

  ‘You’ll get a strike of swots,’ said Woffles. ‘This blighter I’ve got now couldn’t afford to stay up if it wasn’t for fellows like me.’

  ‘Not a penny off the pay, not a word on the essay,’ said Dick. ‘Woffles is being industrially naïf. If he manages things right he might be able to force the dons out in sympathy.’

  ‘Is that a paradox?’ said Bertie. ‘I thought Oxford had given up being paradoxical twenty years ago. They were frightened by what happened to Oscar Wilde, I expect.’

  Dick ran his fingers through the black lock of hair that tended to flop down over his pale forehead—perhaps he cultivated it for the sake of the finger-running gesture. Tom realised that Bertie, without seeming to, had made a perceptive point. There was something out-of-date about Dick’s aestheticism. Although he was in most of his friends’ minds part of the essential spirit of Oxford, to the extent of having had his rooms twice broken up by hearties, he still in a mysterious way didn’t quite belong. It was not, Tom now saw, that he was out of place, but out of time. If you had met him in London you might have perceived at once that he evoked a period twenty or more years earlier, but the curious gauzy quality of Oxford life, the sense of veil behind veil of past undergraduate generations still floating around one, tended to conceal the dislocation. Indeed it might have been the dislocation itself that made Dick seem so imbued with the essences of Oxford—and it might also explain why nobody had seen him quite sober during the past eight months and why his final results were going to seem a come-down after his top closed scholarship to New College.