The Blackpool Highflyer js-2

by Andrew Martin

  Marie said to me, 'You look all-in.'

  Clive was saying something in my ear that I couldn't catch. Now he was standing up, taking Grace by the hand, but my eyes were on Monsieur Maurice, who was sitting and watching Henry Clarke eat fish pie. Clarke looked pretty uncomfortable, as well he might, and the drunken thought came to me: if for whatever reason it was Monsieur Maurice who'd thrown the stone through my window, then the wife was sitting pretty at the present moment, for she was in Halifax, and he was here.

  A little while later Marie was also standing up, saying to me, 'Will you stroll on the beach?'

  There was a shivering mini-sea on the beach, left over from the tide going out. The electric lights on the North Pier were reflected in it. Two figures were walking under the North Pier: Clive and Grace. As I watched, they stopped and kissed. For all that Clive was due his medal, this was his true business: not driving engines but kissing. And the next lot.

  'Well!' I said to Marie, who was very surprisingly nearby.

  I turned and saw a tram coming along the Prom, all lit up like a theatre. Its lights took away from the moonlight. I watched it stop at the North Pier, then move on.

  'You've missed that one,' said Marie, 'but you must get the next.'

  'That's right,' I said, 'I certainly must.'

  I gave a small wave, which was returned, and as I began walking, thinking of the wife in Back Hill Street reading her

  Pitman's Shorthand manuals by the bad light of the gas mantel, plotting and planning for the two of us (and, as I sometimes thought, for the whole of the world) I felt glad to have said goodnight to Marie.

  I hurried back along the Prom, for I knew it was close to midnight. The trams kept coming by, and they were noisier in the night. Or perhaps it was the Prom that was quieter, with just the odd lonely person looking out to sea. You'd get these lonely sea watchers even in Blackpool, but only ever late at night. The lights went along the Prom, up one side of the Tower, down the other, then continued along.

  Central station, right under the Tower, was nearly but not quite dead. You can feel it when there's just one engine left in steam, but that locomotive was somewhere out of sight, and the stationmaster must have booked off, for the ticket collector had a bottle of Bass in his hand. How did he get on the railway, and once on, how did he stay on? He was very thin, and his hair was white and shaggy. He looked like a cornstalk but dangerous with it. His coat was too big for him, and there were egg stains down the front of it clear as day. He was talking to a fellow who had his back to me, and wore a tiny jacket, narrow-go-wide trousers, big shiny boots and a cap pushed right back – not a railway man. He had a big head but a little nose, tilted up like the cap. I put him down as one of those reverse swells, an underminer.

  This big-headed kid was saying to Cornstalk: 'It's a job though, Don, and tha needs brass.'

  'That's fair do's, Max, that is,' said Cornstalk. The voice was high, and it carried. It was Lancashire… Lancashire or Yorkshire, but light.

  'Every ticket with its little triangle clipped out,' Cornstalk was saying, 'and after a while, you know, I get so I can't look at that triangle or any fucking triangle. It's wrong, like, I know, but I don't like fucking triangles any more, and when I see a bottle of this stuff with the fucking triangle on the label…' He stood back, and the bottle of Bass was in the air, and when it came down the pieces of brown glass raced to all parts of the empty station.

  'Will you look out?' I said, as I came up to the two of them.

  'Sorry about that, mate,' said Big Head, but Cornstalk himself said nothing, never looked at me either as I walked through the gates.

  The last Preston train was on platform five. It was a clumsy, late-night sort of tank engine of the kind I didn't know; the kind of beast that wakes you up at midnight as it crashes through your town with its driver cursing at the controls.

  I climbed up and took a seat in Third – it was a corridor carriage. The smashing of the Bass bottle had sobered me up, and I wished I had something to read. Two toffs came by fast along the corridor, one saying to the other, 'It's just this way, now, follow me,' very much at home, as though the train was his personal property. They were looking for first class, I supposed.

  From the platform I heard the guard blow and give the right away, then there was an extra bit of business. The guard was calling to somebody. 'Hurry up now, sir,' and by the respectful tone of voice, I judged it to be another toff coming along at a clip, also making for First. I heard a carriage door slam and Monsieur Maurice, the ventriloquist, was walking along the corridor, breathing heavily. He turned into a compartment two or three along.

  I sat under the flaring gas, looking at the Photochrome pictures over the seats opposite: they all showed Nelson's old flagship washed up on the beach at Blackpool. I waited until the gas works came up, which at night became lots of tiny blue lights spread out along the tracks. I stood up, moving along the corridor until I saw the ventriloquist. He was asleep with his head on his chest, the point of his beard going into his chest like a knife. Across his knees was a newspaper. There was a small cloth bag at his feet. He was more Morris Connell now than Monsieur Maurice.

  I went back to my carriage and thought about Clive. Would he still be under the pier with Grace? More likely he'd be pegged out in the barracks – the engine men's lodging over the road from Central. He'd have to be on the milk train at four though, and back over the Pennines before first light, because the two of us had a seven o'clock go-on at Sowerby Bridge shed. How was he able to be so cool about the prospect of another smash? Maybe it was just his nature. Perhaps that was how a fellow of the right sort ought to be. Then again, perhaps he knew for a fact there wouldn't be another smash, the first one having been arranged by himself. But why would he do that? So that he could get his medal and come out the hero. But why would he want to come out the hero? He was not so determined to get on in his work, as far as I could see. He had never once mentioned that he was aiming for the top link or anything of that nature.

  Ten minutes out of Blackpool, we started rattling wildly over the Fylde, like something being blown along. I looked out of the window for a while and saw the signal lamps coming up, shining green, green, green all the way.

  I fell into a doze, and heard the bang of the starter signal going off at Halifax. The wife was aboard the train, and we rushed away and had a smash, but the wife was all right because she explained that it hadn't been a real train but only the echo of a train.

  At Preston, I was woken by mailbags being thrown onto a barrow and the shouting that always goes along with that job. My connecting train for Halifax, which would be emptier still, was waiting on the opposite platform. I picked up my cap and walked along the corridor. The ventriloquist had left his carriage but his paper was still there. Thinking it could come in for the ride to Halifax, I picked it up. It was a paper for the show business, and running right down one side of the front page was a long thin drawing of a long thin comedy policeman. I picked it up, and saw that one item on the front page had been circled in pencil: 'Henry Clarke and Young Leonard: A Laughing and Applauding Hit in May at thePalace Theatre, Halifax. Re-engaged for the First Week of June. Too Strong for All Rivals.'

  Clarke, the good ventriloquist of the evening just gone, must have been the one I'd meant to see at the Palace in Halifax but missed; I'd gone along later and got Monsieur Maurice instead. I looked again at the paper and for a second thought of ventriloquism as a job like any other, with one man put up against another in the fight for wealth and ease of living.

  ‹o›--

  I returned to Halifax at getting on for two o'clock, and, hurrying along Horton Street, I looked on the old warehouse wall for the Socialist Mission poster. It was still there, speaking of the 'a meeting to discuss questions'. If they do go ahead with it, I thought, it would be them answering the questions, and the coppers doing the asking. Alongside it was a poster for the Halifax Building Society: 'as safe as houses' read the slogan, and that made me hurry
along faster still towards Hill Street, where there was just one light burning – upstairs in our house.

  I was through the front door and up the stairs in a trice. But quietly. The wife was asleep, having left the gas turned low for me. There was new glass in the window and I looked through it. When you have a new window, the bit of the world it shows looks clean and new as well, even if, as in this case, it should only be the gas lamps and sleeping houses of Hill Street.

  As I looked at this scene, George Ogden walked slowly into it, coming from the direction of Back Hill Street. He had his hands in his pockets. Then he turned and looked up. When he saw me looking back, he grinned, and put up one fat paw to wave. He was signalling me to come down.

  It was well past two by now, but I crept back down the stairs, out of the front door, and round to the side, where George was still beaming. 'Evening, old man,' he said. He was pulling his waistcoat down over his belly, so that I could see the assorted shapes of the little items in the pockets.

  'Evening?' I said, 'It's getting on for dawn. Where've you been?'

  'Supper at the Crown,' he said.' Anchovy cream of turbot, then veal kidneys with gin and juniper berries, turnips, asparagus a la creme and roast potatoes on the side, followed by pears a la cardinal with apricot syrup and brandy, cheese plate and biscuits, pot of coffee and liqueurs. But that's by the way.'

  'Hardly,' I said.

  'It seems to be the window-breaking season in this town,' he went on. 'Thinking it over, you're blaming the nutty dyna- mitists, I suppose.'

  'You what?'

  'The socialist-anarchists?' He was holding out a ten-bob note; he pushed it at me. 'They seem to have fixed on you as the fellow to blame for the hardships of all the working men in Halifax, which seems to go a bit hard, since you're a working man yourself and not taking home above, what, twenty-seven bob a week?' He pushed the note at me. 'I'm feeling rather flush just at the moment, so you'll oblige me by pocketing this forthwith, old bean.'

  Well, I was so tired that I just took the money. 'Thanks, George,' I said, 'I'm much obliged to you.'

  'But how did they ever get your address?' he called to me as I made for the front door.

  'Turn in, George,' I said. 'It's late.'

  Chapter Sixteen

  I clattered on the small door inside the big door at Hind's Mill, for there was no bell in sight.

  We'd booked on at five that morning, taking a special to Fleetwood for the Drogheda steam packet, then coming back light. The engine had been running hot; I'd scorched the back of my hand on the motion in finding out, and had been on the look out for carbolic ever since. Meanwhile my hand was wrapped in a mucky bandage. It was Friday 30 June, four days after the late turn at Blackpool. We'd not been back since and there'd just been one other excursion in the week: church ladies to Southport on the Wednesday – trouble-free, but I'd been fretting about George Ogden, who, by paying for the window, had only made me think he must have been the one who smashed it. But he couldn't have been, because I'd seen him in his room only a second later.

  The door of Hind's was opened by a bonny, plump girl in a white dress with a red ribbon round her middle. She looked like a sort of very nice cake, all prettily wrapped up. 'Oh,' she said, 'I thought it was going to be Mr Hind Senior. He generally comes along Friday afternoons with his gentleman's gentleman for a nosey… An inspection of the weaving hall, I should say.'

  'Good evening,' I said, taking off my cap and trying not to be put off in any way; 'my wife works here in the offices, and -'

  'You're Lydia's husband?' she said. 'Oh, come in.'

  I shook her hand. 'Jim Stringer,' I said, and she said, 'Ever so happy to meet you. Cicely Braithwaite.'

  I stepped through the little door and found myself in a kind of vestibule with wooden walls on either side, with bob-holes cut into them. Cicely lifted the hatch on one of the bob-holes, and I saw the wife talking on the telephone as though to the manner born. She was the only one in a light, wooden office with a high desk and tall, shiny-topped stools.

  Cicely Braithwaite dropped the bob-hole door and said, 'As you can see, she's on the telephone presently. She's talking to Manchester, so best not to interrupt.'

  'Who's she talking to?' I said, 'if you don't mind me asking.'

  'Most likely Michael Hardcastle. He's our, you know, travelling gentleman.'

  'I see,' I said, but I did not.

  Cicely Braithwaite was going red. 'He doesn't like to be called a salesman,' she said. She was going redder still, crimson now. 'But that's what he is,' she added, firmly. 'That's where I work' she continued, lifting the opposite bob-hole. There was an office inside, but no people. It came to me that she must be the other office girl, the one spoken of by the wife; the one not allowed the Standard typewriter.

  'My boss is Mr Robinson' she said. 'Well, was. He used to be one of the partners.'

  'He's left though, hasn't he?'

  'Yes,' she said, 'he's been sacked.' The redness came surging up again. She couldn't help talking out of turn, and couldn't help blushing over it afterwards. 'The other office, the one Lydia's in… That's Mr Hind's.'

  'Old Hind's?'

  'No. When we speak of old Mr Hind we always say "Mr Hind Senior".'

  'Or "the fossil"' said the wife, who'd opened the bob-hole of her office and put her head through. 'Your hand!' she then cried, and came out into the corridor. 'Hold it up!' she said.

  'It's nothing to fret over,' I said, as Cicely asked the wife, 'Shall I go and fetch something for it?'

  'Boracic acid,' said the wife, 'that's the best thing.'

  Cicely opened the door to the second office and came back holding a bottle of something and a glass of water, saying, 'Drink this. You look parched.'

  Cicely handed the bottle to the wife who, looking at the label, said: 'Linseed oil. It'll have to do.' The wife began unwinding my bandage, saying to Cicely, 'Do we have another of these?'

  Cicely said, 'They'll have bandages in the weaving room.' She opened a door beyond the two offices, at which moment all conversation with the wife had to stop on account of the racket.

  I was looking through the door at the same thing done over and over again: row upon row of crashing looms, each row under a drive shaft, all the looms connected to this shaft by rolling leather belts, so that the machinery on the floor was tangled with the machinery on the roof, as though a giant spider had climbed over everything making a web as it went. The walls were white; the white was light, and everybody inside looked as though they'd just seen a ghost. Margaret Dyson, the woman I'd killed, had worked in there. No wonder she'd been so keen to get away to the sea, if only for a day.

  The long blister under the bandage had burst, and there was coal dust inside the wet remains. The wife was shaking her head over this as Cicely Braithwaite came back, shutting the door behind her. The silence was beautiful.

  'Was it Michael you were speaking to?' Cicely said to the wife, handing over a length of bandage.

  'It was,' said the wife, 'and he's having to take one thirty- second of a penny on the -'

  'Not on the twelve-ounce?' Cicely Braithwaite put in.

  'Yes,' said the wife, 'on the twelve-ounce.'

  'I knew it would be the twelve-ounce,' said Cicely, as we all went from the space between the offices into the wife's office proper. She took me over to a desk and made me rest my hand on top of a Kelly's Directory. Nearby were many other books lying open, with pages made of different kinds of cloth. I knew what they were: sample books, of the kind seen in draper's shops.

  'What's the twelve-ounce?' I asked, as the wife poured on the stinging stuff and set to with the new bandage. Every so often she would flash a glance over at the telephone, as if expecting it to jump.

  'Twelve-ounce suiting,' said Cicely. 'What do you think about that?'

  I didn't think anything about it, so I just shrugged. It was Clive knew all about suits.

  'Have you not told him about the twelve-ounce?' Cicely Braithwaite asked the wife,
who did look a bit embarrassed over this. There was a kind of force about Cicely Braithwaite that could make you feel a stranger even to your own wife.

  'I'm only just beginning to understand it myself,' said the wife.

  'It's the biggest disaster going,' said Cicely, very happily. She turned to me. 'Let me put you straight, Mr Stringer. Now look at your coat. A lovely bit of worsted, that is. It's quite filthy, and it's full of burn holes but it's a lovely bit of worsted underneath. I reckon that would be about a twenty-ounce cloth. Most suiting is from twenty to twenty-eight ounce. Well, Mr Peter Robinson, the gentleman I worked for in that office over there -' she pointed in the direction of the second office he had the notion of making something much lighter than your common run of summer cloth: twelve- ounce suiting. Light green suiting.'

  'But do you mean light, green suiting, or light-green suit- ing?'

  'Why, both,' said Cicely, 'when all our suiting up to now has been normal weight and blue.'

  'Well it sounds a perfectly good notion,' I said, as the wife wound the bandage. 'I'd feel a lot brighter in a thinner suit.'

  'I daresay,' said Cicely, 'and in some spot like Italy, where it's stifling the year round, it would be just the thing. But they can't give it away here, and they're saddled with miles of it.'

  'Well,' the wife put in, 'have they not thought of trying it in Italy?'

  'Whatever do you mean?' Cicely asked.

  'It would go perfectly well in Italy,' said the wife, 'and would do here too, especially in summers like this, if they just once gave it a starting shove.'

  'How do you mean by a shove?' asked Cicely.

  'Advertising,' said the wife.