The Baghdad Railway Club (3 page)

There was nothing of the East about his actual voice, as far as I could make out, but in the form of words there may have been.

I shook my head. ‘Thanks awfully, but . . .’ He half bowed at me, and we walked on.

‘I don’t think there are
many
cigarettes smoked in the Bible,’ said the wife, as we began to climb the stairs. ‘But then again, that man
is
a Mohammedan.’

‘Not a real one,’ I said.

‘I think he is,’ she said; ‘I was wandering about on the top floor this morning, and I saw him.’

The top floor was where most of the staff had their rooms.

‘What were you doing up there?’

‘Wandering about – I told you. He was kneeling on the floor and facing that direction,’ she said, pointing.

‘King’s Cross station,’ I said.

‘Mecca, you idiot.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know.’

The drink did its work, and we had our tumble on the bed. It was a very good bed, being well sprung, and the fire had been banked up while we’d been downstairs. The goods yard had not gone away though (I had glanced down and seen that they were now moving great quantities of beer barrels) and the pilot engine, which seemed to be very badly fired, would repeatedly blow off its excess steam. I’d thought, or hoped, that I had so transported the wife that she hadn’t noticed the racket, but at the moment we concluded the business, she said, ‘What
is
going on down there, Jim?’

She got off to sleep pretty quickly even so, whereas I could not. The comfort of the room only brought to mind its opposite: the Western Front . . . or maybe the noise of the goods yard had stirred something up. Anyhow I kept imagining what a five-nine crump might do to the spires and pinnacles of the hotel.

I lay awake for the best part of an hour before deciding to return downstairs.

The clock gave a single chime as I put on my suit. There were still a fair few on the staircase, but now they were all coming
up
– men and women in beautiful clothes, smiling and walking with a sleepy trudge. I went against the tide, with my right hand on the banister. (With memories of the front, my right hand had begun to shake, and I held the banister to steady it.)

At the foot of the staircase, I turned and saw the Eastern gentleman – the real Mohammedan – standing outside his tent-like quarters. He held a looped cord on which hung a couple of dozen small metal coffee cups, and he was speaking to the man who had been at the Railway Club, the man with the weird brand of smokes, which I now saw must have been purchased from the Mohammedan, with whom he seemed on the best of terms. He – the Mohammedan – was smiling, and he seemed to say, ‘You are right, my shepherd, you are perfectly right,’ and the other – who still held his magazine – was nodding and colouring up, as though
embarrassed
at being in the right.

I observed this from across the lobby, in which only one or two of the islands were now populated. The man from the Railway Club happened to glance my way, and I knew that he now
did
recognise me, and at this for some reason he coloured deeper. It may have been just shyness, but he seemed somehow
helpless
at that moment. I felt it would be impossible to walk away from him, even though I also knew he would not necessarily welcome an approach. But I
did
approach, at which the coffee-and-cigarette man said something in a low voice to my quarry, and moved away.

‘Shepherd,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘We were at the Railway Club earlier.’

He was a handsome fellow in the later thirties or early forties, slightly built, with crinkly dark hair. I gave him my own first name, but ‘James’ instead of Jim. He gave every indication of being a high-ranking officer. I had him down as a major at least, but it didn’t do to ask.

‘Thanks for the cigarette,’ I said. ‘A very decent smoke . . . It came from there, I suppose?’ I said, indicating the Eastern tent.

Shepherd nodded, but said nothing. Was it a social mistake for a fellow to show knowledge of where another fellow bought his cigarettes? Shepherd was perhaps on the point of utterance when the man who’d occupied the kiosk swept across the lobby towards the front door, having collected his coat from somewhere. (It was a blue greatcoat – nothing in the least Mohammedan about either it or his grey felt hat.)

Seeing me looking at the man, Shepherd said, smiling, ‘His name isn’t . . . Abdullah, you know?’

I thought:
I never said it was.

‘Care for a drink?’ he said, and I saw that this was the way of it with the man Shepherd: he was shy but well mannered. He would try to make up for any display of shyness, or the awkwardness consequent upon it, with a generous offer.

A quick inspection of the lounges off the lobby told us that the Mahogany Room was the only one still boasting a fire. A dozen men sat in there, smoking hard. The first chairs we came to were set either side of a low table, and I could see Shepherd thinking,
If we sit there, I will be interrogated
, but we took those seats anyway. Shepherd set down his magazine, which unfurled itself to reveal . . . well, of course it was a copy of
The Railway Magazine
– the February 1917 number, I had it myself at home. He took his cigarettes from his top pocket and again offered me one. He set down the packet on the table. There was some writing in a foreign script, and a picture of a dark-skinned man in a fez hat walking through a pale-coloured desert at night with a rather paler woman in a red dress at his side. The man’s fez was the same shade of red as the woman’s dress. In the sky above hung a crescent moon and four stars. A waiter came; we ordered brandies (I didn’t care for spirits myself, but I knew they were the right thing to have, late on in a good hotel), and then sat back for an interval, blowing smoke and smiling. I was trying to look like an officer. Shepherd had no trouble in that regard, yet his shyness – or something else – prevented him from opening the conversation.

We both found that we were contemplating the magazine. The covers of
The
Railway Magazine
were always either blue or green, and this one was green. Across the top of it – as usual – was an advertisement for ‘The United Flexible Metallic Tubing Company Limited. Works: Ponders End, Middlesex.’

Shepherd put his hand towards it, saying, ‘Good old
Railway Mag
.’

‘I have it on subscription,’ I said.

‘Me too,’ Shepherd said, blushing again.

. . . But having said this, he once again blushed, which suggested there
was
something shameful in it after all. Yet there couldn’t be if Shepherd did it. I was promoting him in my mind as the seconds went by. Only a lieutenant colonel – say – could afford to be so awkward.

Another silence fell between us.

‘I was
in
it once,’ I said, indicating the magazine.

‘
Were
you?’ he said, and it was genuine interest too.

I believe I then spoke for about ten minutes continuously. I began by telling Shepherd of how I was a railway detective by profession, having been deflected from a career on the footplate by an accident involving an unwarmed engine brake and the wall of an engine shed in Sowerby Bridge, near Halifax. (On the basis of this data, I realised, he must be wondering how I came to be a commissioned officer, for I assumed he did credit me with being an officer of some sort.)

I told him how the police office I had worked in was situated at York station . . .

‘On platform four,’ he cut in, ‘I know it.’

I then started in about how a journalist had come from
The Railway Magazine
and written us all up, giving prominence to my governor, Chief Inspector Weatherill, and giving me second billing in a way designed to cause maximum embarrassment: ‘The sharpers and dodgers of York station have learnt not to run too close a risk in the immediate vicinity of Chief Inspector Weatherill, and his close associate Detective Sergeant Stringer . . .’

At this, Shepherd smiled, but I believe he was smiling at the words of the journalist rather than at my own recollection of them. In other words, he was not laughing at
me
.

‘Go on to the war,’ said Shepherd.

I told him the North Eastern Railway had formed its own battalion . . .

‘The Seventeenth Northumberland,’ he again cut in. I nodded, and waited for him to say, ‘. . . known as “The Railway Pals”,’ and he got points with me when he
didn’t
. I told him that in the second half of the Somme campaign my unit had operated trains to the front from the railhead at Aveluy.

‘Little trains?’ he said, again with excitement.

‘The two-foot railways,’ I said. ‘They’re everywhere now.’

‘Were you running the Simplex twenty-horsepower units?’

I shook my head.

‘Never touched the Simplex tractors. Never saw one, or any petrol engine for the matter of that. We were riding the Baldwins.’

Blowing out smoke, he said the one word, ‘Steam,’ and sat back. He eyed me for a while, sat forward. ‘Are they good runners, the Baldwins?’

‘They’re good
steamers
,’ I said, ‘but the boilers are set too high.’

‘So they’re unstable.’

I drained my glass of brandy.

‘They fall over,’ I said.

I told him how I’d got crocked, but not about the bad business I’d struck in my own unit – the matter of the bad lads within it. He listened, it seemed to me, carefully, and not just out of politeness.

His knowledge of railways might have put him in the Royal Engineers. But they were in the thick of the railway construction, and he’d asked his questions as an outsider. He held back, anyhow, which was his right as the senior man. But he again tried to make up for any lapse in manners by returning to the question of the cigarettes, which he had seen had interested me. Indicating the packet on the table before us, he said, ‘By the way, if you’re a regular here, you’d know that it used to be “
Turkish
cigarettes” and “
Turkish
coffee”.’

I nodded.

We were at war with Turkey. You might as well try and sell ‘German sausages’ as ‘Turkish cigarettes’, and this accounted for ‘Smokes from the Holy Land’ or whatever the phrase had been.

‘I’m surprised the fellow can still lay his hands on them,’ I said.

‘Oh, he can’t of course,’ said Shepherd. ‘His stock’s running very low . . . And they’re becoming rather dried out. With the fires and the steam heating,’ he said, leaning forward, ‘it’s very hot in here, whereas a cigarette wants moisture in the atmosphere.’

I nodded, thinking:
Well of course it’s very hot in Turkey as well.
But perhaps it was the humid kind of heat.

A long interval of silence. Then Shepherd suddenly asked another railway question: ‘How portable are the two-foot tracks?’

‘It takes four men to lift a length,’ I said.

‘Not portable enough.’

I said, ‘You could get away with lighter specifications if the engines were more stable.’ And then I tried a bit of philosophy: ‘Railways are called “The Permanent Way”, but in France just now, we don’t want them permanent. We ought to be able to pick them up and move them in just the same way a boy takes up his model railway when it’s time for bed.’

He nodded slowly, saying, ‘Well it’s time for
my
bed,’ but I fancied he’d liked that answer I’d given him.

He stood up; we shook hands again, and he walked off.

By now, the Mahogany Room was quiet – only half a dozen men left in it. A footman was clearing out the fire, which was a way of getting stragglers to get off to bed. But I wondered about another drink. I turned and saw, standing at the bar, Bartlett, the fellow who chalked up the scores at billiards. He was talking to the barkeeper, with a glass of something on the go.

As I approached the bar, he said, ‘Evening sir. Very fine gentleman, the lieutenant colonel.’

‘What is he?’ I said. ‘Guards?’

‘
Grenadier
Guards,’ said Bartlett. ‘Been involved in some marvellous forward moves, has Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd.’

Well, he would know, being the man who pinned up the war news. I looked across at the green notice-board, and saw in the headlines over and over again the wrong-looking word ‘Kut’.

‘He was decorated,’ Bartlett was saying. ‘D.S.O.’

‘Any chance of a drink?’ I asked the barkeeper.

‘The Mahogany Room closes at two, sir,’ he replied. ‘It’s ten after now.’

‘War regulations, sir,’ said Bartlett; but the barkeeper set another brandy before me. ‘Anyhow,’ Bartlett added, ‘that’s what we say to those chaps not
in
the war.’

‘I’m obliged to you,’ I said to the barkeeper, and put a half crown on the bar, which he pushed back my way.

‘What’s the name of the chap who sells the cigarettes?’ I said, pushing the half crown back.

‘Mr Ali,’ said Bartlett. ‘
Coffee
and cigarettes, it is.’

‘What is he?’ I said. ‘I mean . . .’

‘I would say he was foreign,’ said Bartlett, ‘but friendly.’

‘But where’s he from?’

‘Well now I don’t think you’d be far wrong if you said he was an Arab.’

‘Or something of the sort,’ put in the barkeeper.

The fire had quite gone out, and the steam heating had evidently been turned off in the public rooms.

‘It’s rather cold in here,’ I said.

In the police office on platform four of York station, I was sitting ‘in state’, so to speak, observing the work of my old office with my bad leg up on the desk. This was to remind everyone that I was an officer on convalescent leave, as yet with no news of when I would return to my unit, and not to be troubled by the question of what was or was not in the Occurrence Book, or by the fact that the witness statements relating to an unlawful wounding at the Dringhouses Marshalling Yard had just gone missing for the second time.

I had done my officer training course after all. My commanding officer, Major Quinn, had written from France politely insisting upon it. Six weeks in a country house outside Catterick. The grounds of the place were apparently famous, but I had mainly seen them blurred through window glass, for it had rained almost every day. I had spent most of my time sitting down and being lectured, and sitting didn’t suit my bad leg. It got so that whenever one of the officer-instructors said, ‘Sit down, gentlemen,’ I’d think he was trying to do me in, and when I was driven out of the place, in the charabanc that shuttled between house and railway station, my limp was more pronounced than when I’d arrived.

Old Man Wright, the clerk of the police office, thought I was putting it on. He might easily have been seventy-five, and he’d been bucked up no end by the coming of a war from which he was exempt. The crisis made it seem a good thing to be a scrawny old man in a dullish line of work. With Chief Inspector Weatherill – my governor as was – it was the opposite case. The Chief loved a scrap.
His
war had been out in Egypt in the eighties, and his great regret ever since was that a fellow didn’t come up against too many dervishes on the railway lands of York.

Wright was moving about the office slamming drawers. He didn’t take kindly to seeing me with my leg up, but he could hardly say anything about it, for the Chief, sitting at the desk over opposite, had
both
his legs up. He was reading the
Yorkshire Evening Press
about the British occupation of Baghdad. The date on the paper was Monday April 23rd.

‘They’ve got their tails up in Mespot,’ he said, and I recalled to mind the talk I’d attended at the Railway Club.

‘A hundred and twenty degrees it is over there,’ said Wright, who was perhaps hunting up the missing witness statements. ‘
Bit
on the warm side.’

‘Fancy a walk?’ said the Chief, lowering the paper.

‘It’s raining,’ said Wright, from over near the fireplace, where he was blocking the heat.

But the Chief hadn’t been asking Wright, and he continued to look his question at me.

We walked through the station with the rain thundering on the great roof. I liked to look up and watch it roll over the dirty glass. As the Chief collared a messenger boy, and sent him off to the Lost Luggage Office with a sixpence and instructions to bring back two umbrellas, I watched an Ivatt Atlantic come in, mixing its own roar with the roar of the rain. It was London-bound, and there weren’t many takers for its carriages.

At the ticket barriers, the Chief said, ‘Where do you want to walk to?’ and he named a couple of pubs. Then he said, ‘But I was forgetting . . . you’re a hotel man now, en’t you? What do you reckon? Lowther’s? The Royal?’

As we stepped out from under the station portico, and raised our brollies, I said, ‘Let’s go to The Moon, shall we?’

The Full Moon was in Walmgate. It was most certainly not a hotel. You couldn’t even get a bite to eat there. You could drink
beer
.

Now that I was an army captain, the Chief would constantly set traps for me – giving me opportunities to put on swank, and I did my best to dodge them. He might be a chief inspector in the railway police, but he’d risen no higher than sergeant major in his own days with the colours. This was partly through choice. The Chief didn’t want to be doing with writing up reports and dining in the officers’ mess. He would scrape his knife against his plate; he didn’t know which way you passed the salt.

It was a ten-minute tramp to Walmgate. On Lendal Bridge, with the rain redoubling and the river seething below us, the Chief brought his umbrella close to mine, passed me a cigar, and lit both it and his own. We walked on through the darkly shining York streets, under endless sodden Union Jacks.

‘Well,’ I said, as we turned into Parliament Street. ‘What is it?’

Because he obviously wanted to talk to me about something.

‘Tell you in the pub,’ said the Chief. He liked to draw these things out – a bit of a sadist, was the Chief.

The Full Moon was not full. In fact, it was completely empty and silent. The Chief walked up to the bar, and bawled out ‘Carter!’ which was the name of the landlord – after which the silence gradually returned. Everything was brown, and slightly ticking – the clock, the tables, the benches. After a while, I began to hear the drumming of the rain above the ticking. The Chief swore, called out ‘Carter!’ again, and nothing happened again, but I noticed that the trapdoor in the floor behind the bar was open.

‘He’s in the cellar,’ I said.

Presently, we heard the trudge of Carter on the cellar steps, and he began to come up through the trapdoor.

‘Chief Inspector Weatherill!’ he said, when about three-quarters of him had appeared; but the Chief just said, ‘Four pints of Smiths.’

‘Four?’ I said. ‘Hold on a minute!’

‘Bloody emergency licensing,’ said the Chief. ‘You never know when a pub’s going to close. When are
you
going to close?’ he asked Carter.

‘Not till eight,’ said Carter, handing over the pints, ‘but there’s no long pulls for soldiers.’

We took our drinks, one in each hand, over to the table near the fire. Halfway over the Chief turned back to Carter.

‘I hope you don’t serve milk do you?’

‘Why?’ said Carter, ‘do you want a glass?’

‘Of course I don’t want a fucking glass of milk,’ said the Chief.

The Chief had never drunk a glass of milk in his
life
.

‘Some pubs are serving milk,’ the Chief told me, taking out his bundle of cigars.

I took my first sip of the Smiths.

‘Well, it’s the law,’ I said. ‘And you
are
a policeman.’

‘I tell you, this town’s being run by the teetotal cranks and the bloody cocoa men.’

The Chief was down on the York City Council, and he now started in about how they’d changed all the lighting out of fear of a Zeppelin attack, but then he stopped talking about that, and said:

‘I’m taking you up to London tomorrow.’

I eyed him for a while.

‘In that case I should tell you that I’ve developed rather a liking for the Midland Grand Hotel.’

‘No need for an overnight,’ said the Chief.

‘Is it the War Office again, by any chance?’

No reply. Well, the Chief was busy lighting his cigar.

‘Henderson-Richards again?’ I said.

The Chief knew a man in the Intelligence Section of the War Office called Henderson-Richards. He’d taken me to see him back in 1911, after a case in which I’d stumbled on some government-and-railway business that was to be kept muffled up. Henderson-Richards I recalled as having uncommonly long hair and slipper-like shoes. After talking down to me for a while, he’d made me sign the Official Secrets Act.

‘Different bloke,’ said the Chief, while working the cigar with his mouth.

‘Name of . . . ?’

The Chief set down the cigar.

‘Manners,’ he said.

‘Is he a soldier?’

‘Is he fuck.’

The Chief would refer to certain young military men who didn’t come up to the mark as ‘boy scouts’, but it was a real boy scout who led us up the great staircase of the War Office towards the office of Manners. The kid was about fifteen, and he and his entire troop were doing the work of the War Office messengers who’d gone off to France. We were put in his charge in the great lobby, which was full of men shaking out their umbrellas in a grey light. As we climbed the wide marble staircase, the scout said that his greatest hope was that the war would carry on long enough for him to be in it. But I hardly heard him. I was thinking of what had happened on the train on the way up.

The Chief and I had had a compartment to ourselves: a First Class smoker of course. The Chief always went First – well, he was
The Chief
, and he had the highest sort of staff pass, the one that came in a leathern wallet with an outline of the North Eastern territory embossed in gold. (It looked like the head of a cow.) A little beyond Doncaster, with the wind flinging occasional raindrops at the window, he’d leant forward and handed me a letter that nestled in a ripped-open envelope. It was addressed to me at the police office, and it came from France.

‘I opened it by mistake, lad,’ said the Chief, and I didn’t know that I believed him. Certainly he was very free and easy about the mail, often chucking away his own letters unopened, but I also knew he’d been like a cat on hot bricks over the question of whether or when I’d be returning to my unit.

Evidently, the letter had arrived at the police office on the previous Thursday, April 19th, when I’d been at home. It was from Major Quinn, my C.O., and had been despatched from Givenchy. Quinn couldn’t give his exact whereabouts, but I knew he was in charge of a detachment helping the Canadians with light railways behind Vimy Ridge. He gave me his best wishes, hoped I’d got something out of the training course, if only a good rest, and expressed the hope I’d be rejoining the unit soon. On the other hand, he had received, on April 10th, a letter dated March 14th, and sent from Baghdad, Mesopotamia, by a Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd, who had evidently sailed for the East within a week of my meeting him. It seemed I’d made quite a score with him at the Midland Grand, and he wanted me to join him in helping run the railways of Baghdad, such as they were. Shepherd himself had been invited out there by a high-ranking officer he’d run across in the early days of the war, and had got the job through ‘what was really the most tremendous luck’. (The old school tie more like, I thought.)

Quinn had pointed out that Shepherd had sent his letter only three days after the fall of Baghdad, meaning to indicate, I supposed, that I ought to be flattered at being in the thoughts of a lieutenant colonel during what must have been what Quinn called ‘a pretty hectic time’. Quinn was perfectly happy to let me go if I was so minded.

At first I’d been silent, annoyed at the Chief for opening the letter, and revolving a hundred questions. Then I’d begun quizzing the Chief. Since he had opened my letter, I’d felt he owed me some answers. But he hadn’t seen it like that, and as London approached, and the rain beyond the carriage windows came on in earnest, I’d settled into a mood that was a queer combination of sulk and stirring excitement.

‘This is Mr Manners’s office,’ the Scout said, knocking, and his patriotic front cracked a bit when he added, ‘I don’t mind saying . . . he’s had some queer blokes in here today.’

The shout came from within: ‘Enter!’

Whereas Henderson-Richards, back in 1911, had had hair practically on his collar, this bloke had none at all, and, his head being so long, he could have done with some. On the strength of his name, I’d expected him to have some manners, which he didn’t really. He just indicated a chair for me and another for the Chief, before saying to me: ‘Now you’re off to Baghdad. How did that come about?’

No preamble about whether I wanted to go to Baghdad or not (although I’d decided immediately on seeing the letter that I did want to). No apology on behalf of the Chief for opening the letter; no mention of how the Chief must have telephoned or telegraphed to him or some other department to reveal the detail of it. No explanation of what the letter had signified to the Chief, or how and why it had any bearing on my presence in this office.

Even so, I gave Manners my account of the meeting at the Midland Grand, ending by saying, ‘I believe Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd must have decided to take me on there and then, knowing the job he had in hand.’

‘Yes,’ Manners said when I’d finished. ‘Well, let nobody say the British Army officer is incapable of improvisation. Tell me, Captain Stringer, what do you think it was that the lieutenant colonel saw in you?’

‘I suppose he felt I’d talked sense about the railway logistics of the Western Front.’

‘Mmm,’ said Manners.

On his desk was a red pasteboard folder and a buff envelope. I looked at this stationery for a while, and he watched me doing so. Presently, he said, ‘There is no blinking the fact that we believe Lieutenant Colonel Shepherd to be in league with the enemy.’

‘Which enemy?’ I said.

Now Manners evidently did not think this a clever question – and I could tell the Chief was embarrassed at it, by the way he suddenly crossed his legs, which left him sitting in a position to which he was not at all suited.

‘Captain Stringer,’ said Manners, ‘it might be as well for you to know in advance of your departure for Mesopotamia that the gentry we are fighting over there are the Turks. Have you got that straight? The
Turks
.’

‘But the Germans as well?’ I said.

‘The occupiers of Baghdad were Turkish, I don’t think there’s any room for doubt on that score. It was the Turks that we banished from the city; it is the Turks who may attempt to reclaim it, and it is the Turks who are occupying the territories to the north and west of Baghdad. Certainly, there are German officers on the Turkish Army Staff – but not many, and their role is advisory rather than executive.’

‘And the Arabs?’

‘The
Arabs
?’ he said.

You’d have thought they were completely out of account.

‘It’s their country, after all.’

‘I see you are an expert on the region. There is Arab soldiery in the Turkish Army, and there is a cadre of Arab officers. The loyalty of these men to their Turkish masters may be doubted. The position of the Arab citizenry of Baghdad, incidentally, is that they welcome us as liberators . . .’

I nodded.

‘For
now
,’ he added. ‘As of this week.’