Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

'Where?' her brother asked, quite sharply, as though the matter was of particular importance to him.

'10 Downing Street,' his sister repeated, before carrying on reading. 'The interview was unusually prolonged. Sir Edward Grey remained at 10 Downing Street for just over an hour and a half.'

She turned the page of the paper, and Adam Rickerby sat back and thought about what he'd heard for a moment. He then took up a brush, and began polishing the boot, saying, 'Any railway smashes?'

'No,' his sister replied very firmly.

'Runaway trams?' he enquired, with spittle flying.

'Nothing of that kind,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'How lovely to see our Mr Stringer,' she ran on, looking up at me. But as I walked over to her brother and handed him my boots, she turned two pages of the paper in silence.

I heard soft footsteps behind me. They belonged to Fielding, who was approaching in dressing gown and slippers with his own boots in his hand.

'Have you been to Eastbourne, Mr Stringer?' Miss Rickerby asked, looking up from her paper as I gave my boots to the boy.

'Eastbourne in Sussex?' I enquired.

'Well, I don't think there's another.'

'Is there something about it in the paper?'

'Are you avoiding my question?' she asked. She smiled, but looked tired.

'I've never been there,' I said. 'I just wondered why you mentioned it.'

Fielding, having given his boots to the boy, was lifting the kettle that sat on the range, pouring boiling water into a cup and stirring.

'Ovaltine,' he said, seeing me looking on. 'Would you care for a cup, Mr Stringer?'

'Oh, no thanks.'

The stuff was meant to bring on sleep, and Fielding must have made it every night, for Miss Rickerby paid him no mind as he went about it. She said, 'Eastbourne is the one place I prefer to Scarborough, Mr Stringer.'

'Well, I wouldn't know,' I said, and then I thought of something clever to add: 'But this is Paradise. How can there be any advance on that?'

'Oh, I should think there could be,' she said. 'Probably quite easily.'

Adam Rickerby was polishing Fielding's boots, going at them like billy-o.

'Don't denigrate the house, Miss R,' said Fielding, with the cup in his hand. 'Eastbourne is fine though.'

'Told you,' Amanda Rickerby said, addressing me.

'Debussy wrote La Mer at the Grand Hotel there,' said Fielding, and since he was addressing me particularly I nodded back, in a vague sort of way. 'Then again it's a shingle beach and you can't sit on it… Good night all, and batten down the hatches. We're in for a storm, I believe. You should take a look at the size of the waves getting up just now, Mr Stringer.'

He quit the room, and I too made towards the door when Amanda Rickerby spoke.

'It's late, Mr Stringer,' she said, looking sadly down at her wine glass. 'I believe that Sunday has already gone.' And then, in a glorious moment, she raised her eyes to mine: 'Have you had your treat yet?'

'I had a bottle of beer in Mr Vaughan's room. Does that count?'

'I'm not at all sure that it does.'

'Have you had yours?'

'No.'

'Well then,' I said, 'that makes two of us.'

I glanced over at Adam Rickerby, who'd finished my first boot. What he made of this exchange between a near-stranger and his sister I could hardly imagine. He was polishing hard.

'I'm obliged to you for doing that,' I called across to him.

'I'll bring 'em up in t'morning,' he said, not looking up.

I walked through the doorway, and Amanda Rickerby rose from her seat and followed. She wasn't done with me yet, and I knew I was red in the face.

'When you go to bed, Mr Stringer…'

'Yes?' I said.

'Oh… nothing.'

She wore an expression that I could not understand.

'Why does your brother want to know about railway smashes?' I whispered, after a space.

'Oh just… morbid interest.'

'I could tell him a few tales,' I said.

'You've caused a few smashes yourself, I dare say,' she said, looking up at me and shaking her hair out of her eyes.

'In a roundabout way,' I said.

'You hardly know whether to claim credit for them or not.'

I was for some reason lifting my hand, which might have gone anywhere and done anything at that moment; might have stroked her amazing hair or pressed down on her bosom. But in the end it landed on my collar, and gave a tug for no good reason apart from the fact that the whole house was overheated.

'Any road…' I began, and I heard the wife's voice, saying, 'Don't say that, Jim, it doesn't mean anything.'

'Will you be staying with us tomorrow night?' asked Amanda Rickerby.

'Depends on the engine,' I said. 'But it might come to that.'

'Good,' she said. 'Good night, I mean,' she added, with a very fetching smile, and I felt both an excitement and a kind of relief that anything that was going to happen between us had been put forward to another day. When I walked into the hallway, I saw Fielding, lingering there apparently adjusting the coats on the stand, and I was glad I'd kept my pocket book and warrant card in my suit pocket. He left off as I approached, and climbed the stairs at a lick.

I dawdled up, thinking of the wife and Amanda Rickerby, weighing the two in the balance. Neither was very big on housework but in the wife's case that was because she was too busy doing other things. I couldn't imagine Amanda Rickerby in the suffragettes, as the wife was. She couldn't be bothered. Was she on the marry? She certainly acted like it, and I felt guilty for not letting on that I already had a wife.

Had she been the same with Blackburn? He'd evidently been a good-looking chap… But surely a woman who owned a house as big as Paradise would want more than a railway fireman.

… And what had she meant to say to me about going to bed?

Had she proposed joining me?

As I came up to the undecorated landing, I thought with anxiety of the wife, calling to mind the Thorpe-on-Ouse fair of the previous summer. It had been held on Henderson's meadow by the river. Robert Henderson and Lydia had coincided more than once there, and he'd as good as forced Jack Silvester, who kept the village grocery, and was a tenant of the Henderson family, to give her a prize at hoop-la even though her hoop had not gone over the wooden base on which the prize – a jar of bath crystals – had stood. Silvester had called out, 'Oh, bad luck!' and then immediately met the hard eye of Henderson. The wife was always going on about the condescension of men to women, and here was a very good example of it, as I had later told her. The crystals were not rightfully hers; she ought not to have taken them. Instead, she would soak for what seemed like hours before the parlour fire in the perfumed baths the crystals made. Lily of the Valley – that was the scent, supposedly. The stopper had come wrapped about with ribbon, and the wife had carefully replaced that ribbon after every use of the crystals.

She'd told me that she couldn't believe she'd gone all these years with un-scented baths, so perhaps it was the crystals themselves and not a matter of who had been responsible for her getting them. Her plan was to get on, and I believed on balance that she was determined to pull me up with her, and not run off with Henderson. She surely wouldn't have made such a great effort into making a trainee lawyer of me if she meant to clear off.

I always knew what the wife wanted, and sometimes our marriage came down to nothing but the question of what she wanted. But what did Amanda Rickerby want? On all available evidence, me in her bed or her in mine, but I could hardly believe that was right. Her approaches were too direct. Women went round the houses when they wanted to fuck someone.

I lay on my own narrow bed at the top of the house. I'd kept the window open, and the scene beyond was now illuminated by the flashing of the lighthouse, which seemed to light up the whole empty horizon for hundreds of miles, the light then dying away raggedly like a guttering candle. With each successive flash, the sea seemed to boil more violently.