The Case of the 'Hail Mary' Celeste

by Malcolm Pryce

  ‘Is there no medicine that can save a man’s life?’

  ‘No, the only remedy is to steam down the centre channel away from either river bank. Because of the deadliness of the poison they have never bothered to perfect the art of archery like our English bowmen. Their arrows are toys and do not travel far out into the stream.’

  ‘Is it always possible to avoid the river banks?’

  ‘Usually, but not always.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like to have a nail driven through my ulnar nerve.’

  ‘There is certainly nothing funny about it.’

  With that utterance Mr Gape went silent for a while and seemed to be troubled by a thought. His eyes narrowed as he stared forward and the little boat butted its way upstream with a frisky joy that reminded me of a puppy. The rising sun had soon burned off the mist and the air began to acquire a fierce enervating heat that the cool of the river did little to efface. The very trees began to sigh, and the cries of the monkeys from the treetops became muted. Unprompted, my heart began to sing, and then even more strangely so did I. Or rather I began to hum, ‘Yes, we have no bananas.’ I decided to assay a touch of levity to coax Mr Gape out of his reverie.

  ‘You know, Mr Gape, in view of the decidedly bleak view you take of my chances of survival on this trip, it really was rather short-sighted of you to order just one headstone from that chap from Bojumi. You could have got a much better price if you had ordered two.’

  He looked at me, still slightly absent, and then said, ‘Oh no, I did. I ordered yours as well. Mozambican limestone.’

  Chapter 12

  The next morning, Jenny and I caught the 7.25 from Shrewsbury which was due to arrive in Paddington at twenty past eleven. In the cold light of dawn, the idea of going to the zoo struck me as rather silly, but at the same time rather marvellous too. As we climbed aboard the carriage, the thought occurred to me that I had only ever rarely done things in my life that were silly. In fact, I couldn’t think of any.

  We sat by the window, facing each other. Two chaps joined us. The first walked in after peering at us for a few seconds through the glass from the corridor. He sat down without removing his coat and proceeded to fidget with his feet in a manner that I found annoying. Just before we left the station another gentleman entered, this time without scrutinising his fellow travellers, and took the seat opposite the man with the nervous feet. He wished us all a good morning, placed his mackintosh on the rack above our heads, then opened a small case, took out some papers and began to read. Rain began to patter against the window.

  ‘What happens to the animals when it rains, Jack?’ said Jenny. ‘Are they allowed indoors?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t say. I suppose it must depend on the animal.’

  The man reading the papers from his briefcase looked up. ‘They should give the animals a coat like mine,’ he said.

  Jenny and I exchanged glances. ‘Why do you say that?’ I asked.

  He took out a flask from his case and retrieved his coat from the rack. ‘Watch this,’ he said. He poured some hot tea from the flask into the top which served as a cup and then carefully poured a few drops on to the sleeve of his coat. The tea spilled off the surface like water from a duck’s back. ‘What do you think of that, then?’

  ‘That’s quite something,’ I said.

  ‘Is it a special type of tea?’ said the other man.

  ‘Oh no,’ the chap replied, ‘it’s the material of the coat. It’s entirely new—’

  ‘What’s it called?’ said Jenny.

  ‘The material? It’s called polyethylene terephthalate.’ The man with the annoying foot reached into the hip pocket of his coat and took out some small cheaply printed pamphlets that bore the title ‘Temperance is next to Godliness’. He reached across and held them out to us, fanned like a hand of playing cards. ‘There are other ways to stay dry, if you take my meaning.’ He smiled and urged us with the intensity of his stare. We each took a pamphlet and thanked him.

  ‘That is a very witty comparison,’ said the man with the coat. ‘But perhaps wasted on me. Even at Christmas I wouldn’t suffer a drop to pass my lips.’

  ‘Indeed. Why put a thief in your mouth to steal your wits?’

  At Wellington he expressed regret that he had to leave, claiming it was his stop, but I got the impression he was just moving to a different compartment in order to disseminate more of his pamphlets.

  ‘What a flat tyre,’ said Jenny, ‘making people feel guilty about a drop of the giggle water.’

  ‘One drop can lead to perdition,’ said the man with the coat.

  ‘I’ve never heard it called that before. Most people say barrelled or something.’

  ‘Perdition is a place, not a state of inebriation.’ He reached out his hand to shake. ‘My name’s Beeching, Doctor.’

  ‘Wenlock.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Wenlock.’ He didn’t ask Jenny’s name.

  ‘What was the name of your marvellous coat again?’ I asked.

  ‘Polyethylene terephthalate.’

  ‘Poly-what?’ said Jenny.

  ‘Polyethylene terephthalate.’

  ‘It’s a bit of a mouthful,’ said Jenny. ‘Maybe you should shorten it.’

  ‘What to?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Terry-lene, or something.’

  ‘That doesn’t have the ring to it that polyethylene terephthalate does. This product will revolutionise the clothing industry. For thousands of years man has been a slave to the elements, his every enterprise contingent upon the good graces of the gods of Rain and Shine. But no more! Thanks to my coat, man will become an all-weather animal, more versatile than the duck, moving with equal ease in summer and winter, impervious to the onslaughts of the weather.’

  ‘Bad news for the weather forecasters,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Indeed,’ said the man. ‘But you can’t halt progress. The invention of the pneumatic car tyre was a bad day for the manufacturers of horseshoes, but that is no reason to reject the motor car.’

  ‘Trains are much nicer than motor cars, though, aren’t they?’ said Jenny.

  ‘I’m afraid you are completely wrong about that,’ said Doctor Beeching.

  ‘Oh am I?’ said Jenny, with a tone in her voice that made me think the chap needed to watch his step. ‘And what makes you say that?’

  ‘Is it not obvious? A motor car can travel anywhere its owner wills, whereas a train is confined to the prison of its track. It’s like comparing an eagle to a weathercock.’

  ‘You can get lots more people in a train,’ she persisted.

  ‘Is that supposed to be an advantage? People should stay at their workplaces. Life is a serious business, not a works’ outing.’

  ‘People like trains.’

  ‘What does that prove? Only those who wallow in ignorance can admire trains. All it takes to stop a train is a tiny gradient, one or two inches, and the wheels spin and the fireman has to put sand on the rails to help the wheels adhere. Is that the modern way of transport, to apply the methods of the pharaohs? A motor car could climb to the top of Everest. Think of the colossal waste of manpower needed to build a railway line without gradients. When you build a road you shape the road to fit the contours of the land, but with a railway line it is the other way round, you shape the world to fit the line. The line must be level and so if the land is not high enough, you build it up with embankments, or construct bridges and viaducts. If the land is too high you slice through it and create a cutting. If it is still too high, you bore a tunnel through it at a loss of ten chaps through death for every mile. At other times the rails are raised on stilts, or cut into the edge of escarpments, or somehow tacked to the sheer face of a seaside cliff.’

  ‘But this is precisely why the railways are so wonderful!’ I cried out, startling the chap. ‘The Great Western Railway line between Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads is a marvel – the platform at Swindon is the same height as St Paul’s Cathedral. They call it Brunel’
s billiard table.’

  ‘Swindon!’ Doctor Beeching threw up his hands in horror. ‘And how, pray, did Swindon come to be born? The great railway engineer Daniel Gooch threw his ham sandwich out of the window with the words, “Wherever this sandwich falls, there will I build my town.” Thus Swindon was born.’

  ‘Are you an admirer of the pharaohs, Doctor Beeching?’

  ‘As chemists they were unspectacular, but as builders, as engineers, probably the finest that the world has ever known.’

  ‘Well, I am sorry to gainsay you but the achievements of our railway builders knock those of the pyramid builders into a cocked hat.’

  ‘Poppycock! Says who?’

  ‘Mr Gibson C. Chesterton in his seven-volume historical masterpiece, Railways of Albion. It’s the most authoritative book on the subject in existence. According to his estimate – which I may say has been approved by the steering committee of the Royal Society of Calculators – more earth was moved in the construction of the railway line from London to Birmingham than is contained in the entire Great Pyramid of Cheops.’

  ‘Oh really!’

  ‘The Great Pyramid of Cheops contains 5,733,000,000 cubic feet of stone. When they built the London to Birmingham railway they moved four times that much. It took more than 100,000 men twenty years to build the Great Pyramid, but the London to Birmingham railway was built by 20,000 men in five years. Compared to our great railway engineers, the achievements of the pyramid builders are very modest. In fact, if you sought a fitting comparison to the great railway-building epoch of the nineteenth century you would, according to Mr Chesterton, do better to look back to the construction of the medieval cathedrals.’

  ‘I’m sorry but to compare the construction of railway lines with those sacred wonders the great cathedrals is . . . well, in order to do it a man would have to talk directly through his hat! The cathedrals of Lincoln, Salisbury, or Rheims, Cologne, Notre Dame in Paris . . . really! These are the sublime representations of God’s goodness petrified in stone for all time. The railways, on the other hand, insofar as it is even possible to associate them with the Divine, are merely the . . . the hair that clogs up His sink plug.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, and all to what end? To provide an easy means whereby the feckless can skulk off from work and travel to the seaside? How is the nation served if half the people whose role is to manufacture our goods are sitting on Brighton beach eating cockles? And that social evil pales in comparison to what took place during the construction of the railways – the whole country filled with marauding, violent, drunken oafs.’

  ‘They were heroes!’

  ‘To you perhaps, but not I suspect to any man who had a daughter and lived in a town through which this army of diggers and drunkards passed. Every time they got paid there would be a three-day pitched battle requiring the magistrate to call out the dragoons to quell their madness. Do you defend that too?’

  ‘I certainly don’t, and I don’t deny that such unpleasant scenes took place from time to time, but I would say that the gravity of this has been greatly exaggerated by historians who have not taken the trouble to inquire into the true facts.’

  ‘Oh, is that so!’

  ‘Yes, Doctor Beeching, I rather think it is. Most of the tales of drunken brawling are lurid exaggerations. The reality is of a sober and hard-working body of men who endured privations beyond what we today can even imagine, living in camps that moved with the track, engaging in the most arduous backbreaking and dangerous work. Scarce a mile moved without at least one of their number killed, blown up by dynamite, or crushed by falling rock, or cruelly maimed in such a way that a man would never be able to work again. They were cheated by all they had financial dealings with, their names constantly blackened by all; wherever they went, men’s fists were raised against them. These brave and fearless men, and the courageous women who accompanied them, were, despite the false reputation laid at their door, for the most part temperate, sober and God-fearing. And in the sweat of their brow and salt of their faces they carved out engineering miracles that were the foundation of this country’s greatness, of which you spoke earlier. The great empire we were born of, the greatest the world has ever known, would not have been possible without the railways. But there is more to it than that. The railways are the very soul of our land now: there is hardly a village or hamlet that does not lie on or close to a line. Railway stations are every bit as important and dear to our hearts as the village church. All life is there. There can scarcely be anything sweeter or more rhapsodic than the quiet of a summer’s afternoon on an English railway station, waiting for the train to arrive, aware that it may be quite some time yet, but not caring because in standing amid the quiet and contemplating the world in such a lovely spot, against a background hum of happily chirruping insects, the distant lowing of cattle, the sleepy walk of a station cat . . . why I know not how to express it save to say that during the war, when far from home in the Sudan, it was the remembrance of these things that supported me in the dark hours. And what about the station names? Appledore, Chacewater, Swanbourne, Waterfoot and Temple Combe, Lossiemouth, Ambergate, Kiplingcotes and Kissthorns . . . is this not poetry?’

  ‘Yes, if the index at the back of an atlas counts as such.’

  ‘Doctor Beeching, where is your heart?’

  ‘My heart is a pump, not a toy box.’

  ‘I really can’t allow the calumny that the navigators were bad people. I would like if I may to read you a short passage from Mr Chesterton’s history. It’s a small thing, really, nothing to make a fanfare about, but I have been so deeply struck by the words that I carry them with me.’ I took down my hat from the rack and removed from within the inner band a piece of paper which I unfolded. ‘This is what I believe is known as an oral history. It is the testimony of one Sarah Devereux, the wife of one of the navigators who built our railways. It was written down in 1858, by a woman working for one of the many Temperance Societies that took up the cause of the navigators. Like many people she initially took them to be an army of villains fit only for a terminus in Hell, but she found her views profoundly altered when she encountered first hand these people in the flesh. These are the words of Sarah, as dictated to the lady:

  ‘One Saturday night he took out his money and said us would tramp to Yorkshire. For he’d worked there before and it was all rock, and beautiful for tunnels. I didn’t know where Yorkshire was, I had never been more than twenty miles from Bristol before. We were gone four years, and I wasn’t but just seventeen year old, and I didn’t want to go. And ’twas then us began to quarrel so. He took his kit and I had my pillow strapped to my back, and off us set. Us walked thirty mile a day, it never stopped raining, and I hadn’t a dry thread on me night and day, for us slept in such miserable holes of places, I was afeard my clothes would be stole if I took them off. They was a rough lot there; then us seen and things I wish I’d never heard of.’

  I finished reading and looked directly at Doctor Beeching. ‘Just imagine it, Dr Beeching, seventeen years old, owning nothing but a pillow, walking from Bristol to York . . . four years they were away . . .’

  ‘Four years is not such a long time. I spent longer than that studying at Imperial College.’

  ‘Yes, and I don’t doubt you had very comfortable lodgings. Have you ever been in a position where you were scared to take your clothes off for fear they might be stolen and they were the only ones you had? It really should make us humble, if you ask me. Instead of blackening their remembrance we should honour them for their heroic achievement, one that has few equals in the history of the world, and from which we benefit without thinking every day of our lives.’

  Doctor Beeching gathered up his belongings as we were approaching Wolverhampton High Level. ‘It’s a very pretty speech you made and you would look good making it on a soapbox, but I am a rationalist. I can assure you, the railways will come to be seen as a colossal mistake and future generations will assuredly rid our land of their disf
iguring presence. The future of transport, and I speak here with the authority of a scientific man, is the motor bus.’ He moved to the door and took hold of the handle.

  ‘If you don’t like trains, then why are you travelling on one?’ asked Jenny.

  He seemed annoyed by the question. ‘Because my car wouldn’t start this morning.’ He slid the compartment door aside and said, ‘Good day.’

  ‘Au reservoir,’ said Jenny.

  ‘What a disagreeable chap,’ I added.

  Paddington was a scene of chaos. Rivers of people flowed by up and down the platform; porters struggled against the flow carrying baggage. All bent upon two rituals that define our lives, arriving and departing. We stood rooted on the platform, like a tree stump in a river as the people flowed past. Jenny looked up and around and then said, ‘Oh, Jack, listen!’ It was a platform announcement made over the system of electronic loudspeakers. I turned to gaze at her face; it was shining and I felt an upsurge in my breast of something I suspected might be pride.

  ‘Yes, yes, it really does sound as if the man is inside your head, doesn’t it? But he’s not, he’s over there!’ I pointed to the control room hanging in a mezzanine structure above the concourse, in front of the Great Western Hotel. We walked down the platform and as we passed the first-class compartments Jenny stopped and pressed her nose against the glass. ‘Ours was much more cosy,’ she said.

  We caught the bus outside the station and got off at Regent’s Park and walked. The rain had stopped and it brightened a little. We were not so impressed by the famous Mappin Terraces. Mountains made from concrete that really look nothing like mountains and surely wouldn’t fool an animal. The most popular animal in the terraces was Susie, a polar bear brought to the zoo after being lassoed in Greenland by a party of Cambridge students. She had a sweet tooth and would catch sticky buns thrown to her in her mouth.