Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

'We must get to the bottom of this business,' I said, and he made no reply. I made two further remarks to him as I climbed the ladder: 'Are you two the whole ship's company?' and then, 'This is a bad affair.' All three remarks went unanswered, and no wonder.

The ladder took us to a low iron door that was on the jar. I pushed at it, and we were into a saloon: here was a lessening of the coal smell. White-painted planks had been fitted to the iron to make wooden walls. I noted an oil lamp on a bracket, two couches, a wooden chair; books on a folding table. Another ladder, or something between a ladder and a staircase, came down into the middle of this room.

'Do go up,' the grey man seemed to say. It sounded as though he was asking politely, but that wasn't it. 'Go,' he repeated, as I eyed him. There was spittle always behind his teeth when he spoke, as though the sea rose and fell inside him as well as all around.

At the top of the stairs was a bare wooden chart room, if that be the right description. It was the room set behind the bridge, anyhow. The for'ard side of it was all window save one slatted wooden door that was half window, and this banged constantly so that the sight of the ship's bows, and the wild seas breaking over them, came and went. The Captain walked directly through this door onto the bridge, and I was left alone with the ghostlike foreigner, who kept silence. The water rolled thickly and slowly over the window like quicksilver; the door clattered, and I glimpsed for an instant the edge of the ship's wheel, the binnacle alongside, and a hand upon the wheel. It was not the Captain's hand – so there was at least a third crewman in the know. I heard a rapid pass of words between the Captain and this new man, but I could make out no word in particular over the crashing waters, the rising wind and the banging door, save perhaps the single faint bell of the telegraph as an order was passed from bridge to engine room. The Captain came back in, removed his cap, and drew his sleeve once over his forehead, which was all that was needed for him to recover from exposure to the storm, just as though he'd been walking fast on a summer's day and worked up a light sweat. The door continued to clatter behind him, and I wished he would shut it permanently, for I was half frozen, and the iron stove in the corner of the room burned too low.

The Captain's hair was practically shaved right off, which made him look foreign. They went in for shaved heads in France, and I fancied there was something about his square face not quite English. The word came to me at length: his face was too symmetrical; but he was English – north of England too, going by the few words he'd spoken. He stood directly opposite to me, with the chart table in-between us. The uppermost chart was quite as big as the table top, and showed a sea full of tiny numbers, but I could not make out what sea. A parallel ruler rested upon it, together with an oil lamp and a black book. To the side of the table stood the grey man – the grey Dutchman, as I had now decided – who indicated a chair at the table, and seemed to say, 'Sit down, I dink you want shum corfee.'

I will set down his words normally from now on. He was always only a little 'off in his English, and of the two he seemed the better disposed towards me. But I did not think he was fit for life beyond this ship. Where the Captain was perhaps in the middle forties, the other was in the middle fifties; his beard and face tried to outdo each other for greyness, and it was the dead greyness of driftwood.

The Dutchman quit the room, perhaps to fetch coffee, and I sat down. This ought to have brought some comfort, but instead the movement brought a worsening of my headache. It was a pain that came as a kind of mysterious brightness, a kind of electricity. But the room we were in was dark, and the Captain's face was dark. He laid the small revolver on top of the chart, took his own seat, and lit an oil lamp that stood on top of the chart. He then took a pen from his pocket, and briefly scrawled something in the book that lay on the chart. I supposed this to be the ship's logbook, but nothing about the book gave away the name of the vessel, and it was impossible to read the Captain's handwriting – which seemed to me illegible in any case – in the brief instant of time before he shut the book.

'Why do you have the gun?' I enquired.

'Because we're minded to shoot you,' he said, blowing out the match.

He sat back in his chair, and picked up a pencil. He looked at it.

'You are the Captain,' I said, after a space.

He nodded once, in a mannerly sort of way, still inspecting the pencil. A further interval of silence passed.

'Being the Captain, you might at least take a glance at that fucking chart occasionally.'

No answer.

'And the other one, the one who's gone for the coffee… he's the First Mate.'

The Captain nodded again, put down the pencil.

'I want a change of clothes, hot water and soap,' I said.

I considered letting this fellow know that I had a family, but it would have been wrong to bring them into it. I had considered them too little of late. In fact I had done them some wrong that I could not quite bring to mind, and this was the penalty: I would be removed from their lives altogether.

'Sea captain,' I said, looking up. 'In the town where I was born every other bloody man was a sea captain.'

'Who are you?' asked the Captain.

I raised my hand to the inside breast pocket of my suit-coat. The pocket had survived whatever had happened to me; the warrant card had not.

'You know,' I said.

'But, you see… we want to hear it from you,' said the Mate, returning with coffee.

I nodded slowly at him, and the thing was: I didn't know the half of it.

The North End shed, a quarter mile beyond the station mouth, was where the Scarborough engines were stabled. I felt a proper fool, approaching the Shed Superintendent's office with my kit bag, just as I had in the days when I'd been working with a company rule book in my inside pocket, and not as some species of actor.

It had turned into a nothing sort of a day -1 would have had it hotter or colder, darker or sunnier. The church bells of the city would not leave off, and their racket drifted over the complicated railway lands that lay at the very heart of York. I was tired out. I'd hardly slept on Friday or Saturday night. There were many new noises in our new house: Sylvia reckoned that the branch of the big sycamore tree tapped on her window – 'but only at nights'.

'It taps when there's a wind,' Harry had corrected her.

The thought of taking articles and becoming a railway solicitor made me hot and cold. It was like a fever. One minute, I could imagine the whole enterprise going smoothly on and myself going to the Dean Court Hotel alongside the Minster – which was the refuge of the top clerks in the North Eastern offices – wearing a grey, well-brushed fedora hat. But it would keep coming back to me that the profession I was entering was unmanly. It came down to this: the lawyers only talked about the railway, instead of doing anything to make the trains go.

I wore my great-coat on top of my second best suit. I had on a white shirt and white necker, and I carried in my kit bag a change of shirt and a tie in case the boarding house should turn out to be a more than averagely respectable one. I carried no rule book, but on my suit-coat lapel I'd pinned the company badge, this being the North Eastern Railway crest about one inch across. All company employees were given one on joining, and the keener sorts would wear it every day. You'd be more likely to see a driver or a fireman wearing his badge than a booking office clerk because the footplate lads took more pride in their work.