God Is an Englishman (98 page)

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in their wake and some how, freakishly it seemed to Blubb, remaining upright on the other side. He saw it all clearly for no more than a moment and then it was enveloped, together with half the valley, in a cloud of steam as the following carriages broke free and slipped away down into the stream like a string of barrels shooting a waterfall.

The spectacle was so awful and so final that it had majesty, root ing him there in a kind of trance and watching the wreckage thresh and flounder before resolving itself into a vast, untidy pyramid. It was not until little spurts of colour began to spill down the sides of the pyramid and roll or bounce across the marshy ground, that he could see the wreck in terms of human tragedy rather than a spectacle involving tons of wood, glass, and metal. Then, at last, he crept out, his old heart pounding against his ribs like a sledge hammer, and averting his eyes from the carnage he glanced upward, amazed to see the final coach balanced at a sharp angle, like a diver arrested in the first movement of a plunge. Immediately behind it, and comparatively intact, were two vans, presumably those of the guard and the mail and the phenomenon had the effect of steadying him a little, the sheer improbability of what he saw absorbing the recoil of the shock that was paralysing his brain, so that it struck him at once the final passenger coach had been caught in wreckage ploughed up by the engine and tender, and it was possible, and even likely, that it contained people able to help themselves, if they were encouraged and assisted from without.

He made his decision on the instant. Down on the river banks there was a score of men, and many more, alerted by the uproar were already streaming out of Staplehurst, so he reasoned that they would be likely, one and all, to concern themselves with the first luckless wretches they found, whereas he alone was within easy reach of a coach that might, at any moment, plunge into the chaos below. He clawed his way upward to find the horizontal baulkheads had withstood the shock and were still in position, although there was nothing at all between them and the field below and it was there fore necessary to move cautiously, as upon a catwalk. A middle-aged man with an imperial, whose distraught face seemed to Blubb vaguely familiar, was already half out of the shattered window of the second compartment, wrestling with the door-handle, and as Blubb shouted a warning he lunged himself forward and downward, so that Blubb was there to support his weight for a moment while the passenger’s flailing feet found the steeply angled step. He seemed uninjured and in control of himself, for he said, breathlessly, but authoritatively, “Stay there…two ladies…pass them down!” and Blubb braced himself to receive the weight of two women, one young and GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 526

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pretty, the other elderly and hysterical. Neither, so far as he could see, was injured and the younger woman scrambled nimbly through the window without much help. The elder was halfway through when she collapsed, and hung there, wedged in the aperture like a rag doll plugging a small hole in a fence.

It was a terrible business easing her through, despite the absence of all but a splinter or two of glass. She was wearing one of those monstrous, box-pleated crinolines, flat at the front but very full at the back, together with armoured stays and innumerable petticoats, some of which caught on the jagged woodwork of the frame and ripped to tatters. The iron-nerved passenger with the imperial beard heaved and strained, and Blubb, his chest level with the step, stood like Atlas supporting her weight as she descended on him an inch at a time. By the time she was free two other men were there to help and the younger woman had disappeared, so that Blubb moved nearer the bridge with the bearded traveller at his elbow and heard him say, wheezing for breath, “Party in there…children…” but he was clearly incapable of hoisting himself up and seemed to Blubb near the point of collapse. He said, “Wait on, sir…I’ll go up. Could you handle the nippers if I winkled ’em out?” and the man nodded wordlessly, passing his hand across a brow coated with dust and sweat. Blubb grabbed the handle of the compartment and hauled himself up, not without a fearful glance over his right shoulder, for the coach rocked twice and then gave a lurch before settling again. Then, of all people, the Gaffer’s face appeared in the window and Blubb, occupied with establishing a precarious balance, muttered, “Christ A’mighty,
you!
”
as he hauled himself level with the window and saw what appeared to be a coachload of dead bodies, sprawled at all angles, and between him and the charnel house the face of his employer, Adam Swann, with a great jagged cut below the right eye pumping blood and spattering everything about him.

Blubb thought then that he would die himself, falling backwards over the balustrade of the bridge, and fear prompted him to make the effort of his life, gripping the doorhandle with his left hand and clawing the edge of the window frame with his right For perhaps twenty seconds he hung there like a fly on a wall, watching Swann grope his way down towards the bodies at the far end of the compart ment and then claw himself back again, moving crabwise and dragging behind him a screaming boy, aged about three. The child’s screams helped him, stirring in him a terrible compassion for every one in there, but, rising level with his pity, a terrible hatred and contempt for railways rose in his throat like bile so that he saw himself, in that moment in time, as a man singled out by Providence to avenge all the other victims of the gridiron, living and dead, who GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 527

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had mouldered away in failed inns, in bankrupt livery stables, in tumbledown toll-houses and in want and destitution over the years. The mission acted on him like a cordial, injecting a new and furious energy into muscles that he did not know he possessed, or had ever possessed, giving him the strength and dexterity to improve his posi tion in a manner that left one hand free to drag the child through the hole, to steady him for a few seconds while he levered himself round, and then, with infinite gentleness, to lower him into the upraised hands of the man he had helped rescue the two women further down the coach.

He was no longer aware of the uproar that surrounded him on all sides, or even of the presence of the other helpers scrambling up the embankment in ones and twos, or indeed of anything but the neces sity to empty the compartment of survivors before the coach broke away and continued its arrested nosedive into the field. He accepted the fact that this would happen very soon, that every second he re mained there, every movement he or Swann made, underlined this certainty, but it did not occur to him to release his hold on the door handle and jump clear while there was a chance of extricating the four other people trapped in that debris. The little girl who was passed on to him was much easier to handle for she was unconscious and as light as a feather, but when Swann dragged an older child level with his chest he was obliged to use his teeth as well as his free hand, biting into the collar of the summer dress she was wearing and shifting his left-handed grip on the handle so that he could roll her on his belly and let her fall between himself and the coachwork into the arms of men on the baulkhead. The movement, carefully judged as it was, came near to causing the ultimate disaster, for the coach began to rock violently, flailing its broken coupling against the baulkhead and prompting another chorus of warnings from below. He ignored them, readjusting his grip and finding a blessed purchase for his knee against what he imagined must be the hinge of the door, and it was this anchorage that enabled him to claw Mrs. Swann through the window, although he could never have managed it had she not stirred and opened her eyes as Swann levered her towards him and he got a grip on her bunched skirt. She seemed then to understand what was happening and co-operated to a degree, taking some of her weight on her elbows and getting a purchase with one foot on the split horsehair of the backrest, but she could never have worked herself free without Blubb’s leverage from outside and the effort used up the very last of his strength so that when she fell he could do no more than grab at the tatters of her dress that came away in his hand. Those below must have broken her fall for he saw her stand upright for a moment, her mouth open, her arms gesturing feebly towards the place where GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 528

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he stood and he read her message, despite the successive waves of giddiness that assailed him now, causing him to spare a final glance at the interior of the compartment and the mask of blood that had little in common with the man who, so improbably, had appeared from nowhere seven years before and had helped him rebuild his pride. Then, glancing over his shoulder, and perhaps assessing the wisdom of jumping down to make way for a younger, stronger man, he saw that the group under the step had scattered, and at first their abrupt disappearance did not connect with the slow, deliberate slide of the structure to which he seemed to have been clinging for an hour or more. When the connection was made, and he understood precisely what was happening, he gathered himself for a spring, aiming roughly at the baulkhead but knowing somehow that he would miss it and fall through the gap on to the debris below, and this was how it happened and there was no one to break his fall, only spears of splintered coachwork and one steel buffer that struck him above the heart. The buffer absorbed the impact to some extent but the collision was lethal none the less, for it catapulted him clear of the wreckage and he fell like a sack into a patch of spongy marsh, and lay there spreadeagled, half-buried in soggy, trampled grass.

Only one or two bystanders saw him die. Most of them, including those scrabbling frantically among the wreckage of the carriages lying in the stream, ran for their lives when coach and vans crashed down between the piers, remaining upright for a moment before slip ping sideways and rolling over on their backs like three grotesque insects with wheels instead of legs.

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Her responses during what she later came to regard as the deep trance period, a matter of ten days or so, must have been as involun tary as they were polite and practical; orders issued; information supplied; decisions taken, all with that frozen area of her brain that had governed speech and actions at the scene of the crash, and con tinued to serve her up to the moment they came to her with the straight alternative. To amputate, or to let him take his chance. If it was a chance.

The decision had a curious effect. It cracked the ice that had insu lated her to a great extent but, once it was made, a second, shallower trance succeeded it, so that full awareness of what the disaster meant to them all in terms of personal adjustments continued to elude her. This second state of mind prevailed through the remainder of the summer and, to a degree, until autumn had spotted the wooded spur behind the house with old blood and guinea gold, reminding her that the rhythm of the universe was entirely unchanged, that it had not faltered, as everything else had faltered, because a foreman plate layer had looked at the wrong page of a railway timetable on the afternoon of the ninth of June.

That same night she paused to do something it had not occurred to her to do throughout the entire interval. She stopped in the act of undressing to hold a candle up to the dressing table mirror, studying the reflection calmly and objectively in a manner uncharacteristic of a time when she had acknowledged vanity as a vice that a woman deeply in love was entitled to practise.

What she saw in the oval frame astonished her. A tense, hollow-eyed woman she would have judged about thirty-four or five. A woman who had slept very little in weeks and who was convalescing perhaps but had, in the process, struck some kind of bargain with the future, exchanging dimples and a ripe mouth for a tautly-stretched skin and a prim little gash. Someone who had ceased to be GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 530

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concerned with the clothes she wore, how she dressed her hair, what effect sun, wind, and insomnia had upon her looks.

She sat studying this stranger for a long time, moving slowly to wards the point of recognition. Outside the night sounds in paddock and copse resolved themselves into a familiar pattern and with that small part of her mind not engaged with the process of adjusting to the transition from polite, disembodied ghost to someone of flesh and blood and complete awareness, she juggled with dates, measuring the most distant of them against the time available for a counter-attack upon the terrible demands of the last few weeks and finding a measure of reassurance in the answer to the sum she set herself.

Spring was the earliest estimate Sir John Levy had given as the time of his return. It would take a man that long, Sir John had said, to learn to walk again, and it was two seasons and a child away. Preg nancy exacted toll from the figure but was, on the whole, an honest trader in that it often bestowed something in return. Bloom to the cheeks, and a definite sense of renewal in terms of youth and vitality, a very comforting thought, to be used as a reserve against months of loneliness and the stresses resulting from the biggest challenge of her life.

Then, as the candle guttered in the draught, another thought occurred to her. Like a whiff of fresh air invading a stale sickroom, like the swift passage of the court jester through a council chamber of sour-faced ministers of State, the enormity of her double deception proclaimed itself, so that the tight little mouth she was studying quivered, experimenting with the forgotten habit of laughter.

And it deserved a laugh, she told herself, as he, of all people, would be the first to admit, for how many husbands returned home after a nine-month’s absence to learn that they had not only been superseded as helmsman of a business but were obliged, into the bargain, to ack nowledge an addition to the family?