Death on a Branch Line (22 page)

It seemed to me that of all the people around the table, Lydia was in the greatest request. She had recovered from her early shock, and I saw that this was a world to which she was very well-suited, and from which she was being unfairly kept by her low-class husband.

Milly Chandler was saying to her: ‘I don’t agree with you about religion. I think it’s all lies.’

‘Is that why the vicar’s not here?’ asked the wife.

‘I notice you make a connection between God and vicars,’ Milly Chandler said. ‘I find that interesting. In fact, the Reverend Ridley’s not here for the simple reason that he’s a perfectly horrible man who once put his hand on my – well, let us say my
derrière
. It was after matins,’ she added, and at this she started doing a little dance with her glass held high in the air. As I watched her – and watched especially her white, rolling bosom (that ruby necklace was a very brave adventurer) – the manservant and three other servants new to me came down the stone steps carrying a sofa and a divan.

I thought:
Christ, is this for me?

But Usher indicated the sofa to the ladies, and they sat down in it. He then invited the Chief and Bobby Chandler to the divan, while he remained standing, letting everyone see his perfectly pressed trousers, and the golden watch chain stretched across the silk ribbon that ran around his middle.

During all this, the wife was talking once again about the women’s movement, and Usher flashed me a couple of glances as she did so. What had the Chief told him of me?

As the wife spoke, the Chief looked down at the glass of champagne in his hand. He was not in favour of the women’s cause: the suffragettes were too pushing. And yet he sat silent. He knew something of what was happening, and was silent on that account. The Chief had once described himself to me as ‘self-educated’ and
I wondered whether I fell into that bracket. I had been taught how to fire engines, but did that really count as an education? I knew a dart from a pricker or a paddle, and that ‘little and often’ was the best way with coal and water. But my work had never impressed Lydia, and she’d thought it a blessing when I’d been stood down from the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Well, I’d known what I was taking on when I married her. She was always trying to climb, both for her sex and for herself. She wanted everything a woman could have, and everything a man could have, too.

The manservant came over again, and poured more claret. The stuff was too warm. They would have an ice chest somewhere for the champagne.

‘Might you stick the claret in the ice for a while?’ I said, but the man had already gone, and I was glad about that.
You had a narrow
squeak there, Jim!
I thought. Cold claret! The stuff had to be warmish, like blood.

I walked after the manservant, and asked him where the water closet was – I had never called a jakes a water closet before. He directed me through a dark arch cut out of a yew bush, and I was in the territory of the kitchen garden. On low black trees that looked like old men, lemons grew. They glowed in the deep darkness, but
lemons
? Could that be right, even in the heat of this summer? I walked a little way of the gravel path towards them and saw that they were lemon-shaped yellow apples. Anything seemed possible as (having given up my search for the water closet) I pissed by the sweet-smelling compost pens.

When I returned to my former post on the terrace, Usher was speaking to the wife, and I did not like this connection between them. If it continued, I would have to put aside my claret, top-class vintage though it might be, and lay the bastard out.

‘Are you quite opposed to violence on behalf of your cause?’ he was asking Lydia.

‘Not absolutely,’ replied the wife. ‘Are you in the case of yours, Captain Usher?’

He gave a half-smile that made his handsomeness double. Lydia never called a man handsome, but you could tell when she thought
it. I put my hand into my inside pocket, and there was a single paper there. Lydia said something else about the women’s movement, and Usher, lighting a cigarette, said, ‘Hear, hear!’ He seemed to be making out that he agreed with her, but how could he? A man like that was sure to be an Ultra.

I heard the faint sound of the Adenwold clock striking midnight as Milly Chandler stepped onto the lawn with a glass in her hand, calling out that she was looking for glow-worms. A bottle of whisky and a siphon were now on the go, and a cigar box started doing the rounds. As long as both of these stayed away from me, I would not be sick.

Instead, Bobby Chandler came over.

‘Lydia and the Captain are hitting it off rather well,’ he said, but I would not rise to the bait. Instead I asked him in a rather slurring voice about Hardy, the station master.

‘I’ve seen him once or twice,’ said Chandler. ‘My brother-in-law told me to look out for him as one of the leading curiosities of the village. To George, the man was a buffoon, plain and simple, but I wonder. He’s an amateur historian, you know – hides from the world. His only refuge is with those toy soldiers of his. Seen them, have you?’

‘A lot of people around here like midget objects,’ I said, for some reason.

More claret came.

‘Could you manage some more?’ asked the manservant, and I replied ‘Yes’ but I knew it would be a struggle. I was crippling myself with this stuff – it was beyond all reason. Was I alcoholic? If not, it was probably because of Lydia. That was the great thing about having a wife. She checked your drinking.

Chandler was moving away from me; John Lambert remained sitting on the far step. My hand still rested on the paper in my pocket. I took it out, and saw the docket that Will Hamer the carter had given me – the proof of the wire having been sent.

Usher was still speaking to Lydia, and still his speech was well-greased.

‘The ladies might break a few windows in Oxford Street,’ he
was saying, ‘but is that so serious a matter? It seems to me they are driven to it not by a deep malice, but simply by the excitement of the moment.’

‘No,’ the wife cut in.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Usher.

‘They are not driven to it by the excitement of the moment, but by the injustices of the centuries.’

‘The excitement of the moment or the injustice of the centuries,’ said Usher. ‘I am not going to split hairs over that. The point I wish to make is that they are handled too roughly by the ordinary constables.’

I watched the wife’s face. I knew when she was likely to give trouble, and all the warning signs were there, but Usher of course could not see them. He was lighting another cigarette. He drew a line of fire in the dark-blue air as he waved out the Vesta, saying:

‘The ladies have a will of iron. Unfortunately, their bodies are not made of iron, and all concerned should act accordingly. The watchword of the constables ought to be: “Remember these are ladies – handle with care.”’

The wife stood up from the sofa and folded her arms. Poor old Usher had jarred, for if there was one thing the wife disliked more than unkind remarks about the women’s cause, it was
kind
remarks about it.

I addressed myself again to the data on the docket or receipt in my hand, which seemed to be perpetually being replaced by another version of itself dropped from above, like raindrops repeatedly falling on the same spot. I would make out one or two words, and then it would drop again. As I finally made sense of the receipt and lowered it slowly onto my knees, I noticed that the Chief was looking across the terrace towards me.

He had arrived before the telegram had been sent.

PART THREE

Sunday, 23 July, and Monday, 24 July, 1911

Chapter Twenty-Four

The butler or manservant gave us a storm lantern, and we used it to light the way back to The Angel. It made the trees swing and rear up as we pushed on, the wife talking about Usher, and how he’d said the women’s cause could ‘bring the women up’, and other wrong things.

‘I don’t think John Lambert’s in any danger,’ she said. ‘Usher’s an ass. But still, you can see that Lambert needs to be taken in hand. He has a condition of some kind, a mental … a sort of hysteria, I’m sure brought on by what’s going to happen to his brother.’

Her success at the party had made her over-confident, it seemed.

‘We women have wills of iron but very frail bodies, you know,’ she ran on. ‘I suppose Captain Usher’s body is made of iron. I’d say his brain probably is.’

She broke off in her speech when our light showed a fox on the track before us.

I was drunk but not, as it turned out, in the worst way, for it had been good wine. I felt outside of myself somehow, and revolved my new discovery just as though it had no power to harm me. The paper in my pocket showed that the wire asking the Chief to come to Adenwold had not been transmitted until 12.30, whereas he had arrived by the 12.27 train. I had no idea what had gone wrong with Will Hamer, his rulley or his beasts, but there were any number of possibilities. The Chief had not come to the village on my account; he had arrived quite independently.

I began trying to explain this to the wife, but she was hardly listening, and did not take the point.

‘… It was only a coincidence that we coincided at the station,’ I said, and she asked, cheerfully enough:

‘How drunk are you, Jim?’

In our room, we kissed in a friendly way, for she knew she’d been the star of the evening, even if wrongly dressed and not invited to the meal. Then I turned out the lantern, and the slice of moon moved right up to the open window. I watched it from the pillow thinking:
I am investigating my own Chief
. Nothing could be worse for my prospects or more generally shocking, but I went directly to sleep nonetheless.

I awoke at the chime of three, however, and knew that I could not put off finding an answer.

I stood up, dressed and caught up the lantern we’d been given at the Hall. The wife changed position twice as I did so, but she slept on. Outside the front door of the inn, I lit the lantern, and set off back for the Hall.

The lantern showed swinging, grey-coloured pictures of Adenwold: closed doors, shuttered windows, high blank hedges. I took the early track through the woods, and followed it to the rear gate of the Hall, which now stood unattended. I moved fast across the grass, approaching the lines of cone-shaped trees.

The Chinese lanterns on the terrace were now only so much dangling litter, objects of no significance, long since burnt out. The table had been removed, but a line of empty bottles remained on the bottom step of one of the two staircases.

Light glowed from two of the house windows. I turned the lamp off and went up the steps into the mathematical garden. I was not sticking to the complicated paths: I went as the crow flies, and I could feel ornamental plants falling under my boots.

The light in the sky was ash-coloured, a sort of emergency light. There was just enough to see what was important. I had now reached the low windows of the rear of the house, and a voice in my head put the question:
Where are you going?
A sash window standing open gave the answer. I ducked down and I was in, coming bang up against a piano. I took out my matches, and relit the lantern. The room grew as the light flared – a long yellow room
with multiple sofas, as if the contents of many ordinary drawing rooms had been taken into it.

It held no fewer than three wide, peaceful billiard tables. The lantern showed me a dark painting of a boy and a greyhound over the fireplace, and I pictured Sir George Lambert and his sons in this room, each playing his own game on his own table.

I moved now into the hallway, which offered the front door and the main stairs as ways of escape. But I could not have said whether I was aiming to find or avoid the occupants of the house. I began a circuit of the hall, and the first room that I came to contained a harpsichord and many photographs, both on the walls and on the mantel-pieces. They were all of men shooting or hunting, and one showed a cricket game. It ought to have been possible to work out which man was Sir George – his would be the face that cropped up the most often – but I had no time to examine the pictures.

My lantern was like a
magic
lantern, showing me dream-like pictures. The next room along was done out in a Chinese style with tall vases and delicate black cabinets holding pottery that was Oriental in looks but otherwise mysterious to me. The main object in the room was not in the least Chinese, however. It was an old soap crate, and it held more photographs – some framed, some not – and a stack of handwritten papers.

I picked up the first framed photograph. The young man pictured was Master Hugh. He was standing before a tree, and looking as though taken by surprise, but quite happy about it. He was grinning, perhaps on account of his hat, which was completely shapeless in a countrified way. I picked up the first of the papers that was to hand. It was a short note, and the address was Park Place, London S., which I took to be a
good
address.

‘My dear Hugh,’ it began. ‘This is up to the mark. It has the music of the place. You pretend not to know it, but if you heard a note wrong in the happy speech of the public bar in that pretty village of yours … this you would instantly detect. Have you tried Heinemann’s? If they bite, you would perhaps be five pounds to the richer, for one book of poetry equals one very good dinner in Mayfair, or one good lunch and a
haircut
.’

It was signed ‘Paul’.

I picked up another paper, which carried the heading ‘Station Hotel, York’ and was evidently from John Lambert:

Greetings and thank you for the verses, which I find beautiful,
although whether that means anything coming from a railway
drudge, I doubt. You asked how my work is going here and
you can damn well endure the answer. Many of my supposed
talents go to waste in this business, but it might be regarded as
useful. Are you bored by railway timetables? You might not be
if you knew how they were put together. (How’s that, by the
way, for the beginning of a chapter in
The Wonder Book of Railways for Boys and Girls?) …