Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

'I know you won't mind me interrupting, Jim,' he said.

'It could have been worse,' I said, craning about.

'Old Fielding,' he said, as I left off pissing and pulled the chain.'… Guess where he was in the three months before he came here?'

The flushing of the toilet was so loud (it was as if the thing was throwing down half the German Sea) that I couldn't hear what came next, and had to ask Vaughan to speak up.

'York gaol!' he repeated, over the dinning of the waters.

With gun in hand, I began to turn about, but stopped to watch the kid. He had backed away from me, and his right hand rested on the gunwale. Behind him, on the other ship, the man who had raised his arm had lowered it, and he had turned a different way, looking for another bit of good to do; his vessel was also bouncing and swinging away from us, taking him on to the next business.

The kid, leaning against the gunwale, turned from me to the departing ship. But I ought not to be bothering about him. I had a decision to make. I could go for'ard with the gun or I could go aft. At present, I was looking aft. I could see clear past the bridge house to the wake our ship was making. I ought first to make for the engine room, stop the blokes who were creating that wake. They were party to a crime as long as they continued their work. I pictured them as small, half deafened and blinded, blackened blokes who never questioned the ringing bells that brought their commands. I would go to the bridge, and work the lever that told them to change direction. Suddenly a great wind came, and the fore-deck behind me went low and the bridge house tilted towards me, as though its illuminated windows were eyes, inspecting me. The ship righted itself, and there came the sound of hammering – a hammering on iron. I turned fully about, facing away from the kid, and I was instantly felled by a giant, flying sailor.

The gun flew from my hand as I collapsed to the deck. The ship made another slow rise as our struggle began. There were not at first any blows; at least, I did not think so at the time. It was more like a kind of wrestling, in which I was ever closer smothered by the sailor's great weight and his wide oilskin. I was under him, and his stinking breath, and then for an instant I was up, seeing the sea from the wrong angle as the ship pitched again – and catching a glimpse of the gunwale, where the kid had been standing, and was no longer. In that moment of distraction, the sailor had caught hold of my ears, one in each hand. They made convenient handles for him as he contemplated me. His great face was in two halves: black beard and the rest – and the rest was mainly nose. You are ugly, I thought, and perhaps he meant to say the same to me. He got as far as 'You' before rage over-took his speech, and he dashed my head down onto the iron deck.

The next time I lifted my head, I lay in the iron parlour again, my only companion the mighty slumbering anchor chain. The ship rose and fell, and I slipped in and out of dim dreams. Presently I looked down at my right hand, which lay like a thing defeated. No gun there.

I had been on the deck, and removed in one dark instant from it. The same had happened to the kid, only I was sure he'd gone overboard in hopes of reaching the second ship. Why had he given over the gun? Because he knew he was in queer, and didn't want any part of what was going on or was about to go on.

I fancied, over the next long while, that I occasionally heard the ringing of a bell but it was nothing more than a faint tinkling through the iron walls, and I could not keep count of the strokes. My pillow was a link of the anchor chain, and it served as well as goose feathers. My trouble was the cold, and I would ward it off by ordering myself to sleep which I seemed able to do at will. They hadn't drugged my coffee on my first trip to the chart room, I had decided. Instead, I had picked up a sleeping sickness as a result of whatever had happened at Paradise.

The house came and went in my dreams along with all the old familiars: the red-shaded oil lamp, the over-heated blue room, the roaring white gas, the magician with his kettle, the long needle. In addition, a man with puffed-up feet scrambled about on the bathroom floor for blood tonic, and the poor fellow was cutting himself to ribbons in the process, being quite desperate. A voice spoke in my head, a smooth character sent to explain my own thoughts to me said, 'You see, Jim, he was the last man left in Scarborough.'

Nobody walked the Prom; the lighthouse was dark; the two carriages of the funicular railway stood dangling out of reach, neither up nor down; each of the three hundred and sixty-five rooms of the Grand Hotel – one for every day of the year – stood empty, and drifting black smoke had possession of the town. The sea had come all the way up to the railway station. It was exploring the excursion platforms and the engine shed beyond. I saw the wax doll in the lavender room, the blue flame of the paraffin heater, and a paper fan that, when folded out, revealed a painting of a sea-side town that was not Scarborough but showed Scarborough up, put it to shame, this one being sunlit, with handsome people walking along a pretty promenade, and a light blue sea beyond.

All at once I was there, with my own wife and my new wife, who chatted away merrily, which I knew to be wrong, and which did cause me anxiety, but I put it from my mind for I was away from Scarborough in an altogether better sea-side spot, at least for a while. Scarborough waited for me, however, and I knew I would have to go back there, to examine the disaster that had befallen the place and to account for it and to answer for it.

Walking down the stairs towards the comfortable landing with my boots in my hand, I revolved the words of Theo Vaughan. Were they true? He must know that I could hardly check by asking Fielding himself.

He had, according to Vaughan, been lagged for raising funds for a publishing company that didn't exist. It went down as fraud. It hadn't been such a great amount of money, and it had all been repaid so he'd only got three months. Vaughan had once had the newspaper clipping that told the whole tale, but he'd lost it (which went a little way to his credit, I thought, since it seemed to mean he didn't have a plan to use the information, but would just blurt it out as the fancy took him).

The prison sentence explained Fielding's presence in Paradise, according to Vaughan. He'd always been keen on the sea, and had come to Scarborough to catch his breath after the shock. He found the house to his liking, if a little low class, and had taken it in hand; set himself to raising the tone with fancy recipes, a few sea paintings here and there, cigars in the ship room, sherry in the evenings. He'd put some money into the house too, and was largely paying the cost of the redecoration of the second floor, for the prosecution had not finished him financially speaking.

I approached the kitchen, and the door was on the jar, letting me see the long table. All the items upon it were a bit better ordered now, and stood in a row: knife polisher, big tea pot, vegetable boiler, corkscrew, toast rack, two dish covers. The kitchen had been cleaned, and the supper things put away. Adam Rickerby had done it, I knew. He liked things orderly. That youth now sat at one end of the table, applying Melton's Cream to a pair of women's boots – his sister's evidently – and she was reading to him from a newspaper with a glass of red wine at her elbow. She was certainly a little gone with drink, but she spoke very properly.

'Interview with foreign secretary,' she read, and took a sip of the wine. 'Sir Edward Grey had an interview with Mr Asquith at 10 Downing Street this morning…'