Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

'Come again?' I said.

'For a piss,' the Mate put in,'… or the other.'

He wouldn't say the word. They were quite gentlemanly, this pair, after their own fashion. I thought about the Captain's question: going by the state of my trousers I must have pissed myself at some earlier stage in the proceedings, but I was not going to boast about the fact if the stink coming off me hadn't made it evident. As for the other business – that had all somehow gone by the board. I shook my head.

'Then carry on with your story,' said the Captain.

'I'll start it if you tell me what happened to the kid.'

No answer.

'I reckon he was scared half to death,' I ran on.'… Now have we unloaded the coal? No, don't reckon so, because we're still sitting low in the water, and the ship'd be even filthier if we had done. When's the turnaround?'

'For you,' said the Captain, 'it could be quicker than you think.'

We eyed each other for a good while.

'Well,' I said,'… where was I?'

'Paradise guest house,' said the Captain.

'I know, but where had I got up to?'

It was the Mate who answered.

'Your engine was all fixed, but you did not take it home with you.'

He made me sound like a schoolboy with a broken toy. Still, it was no fault of his own that he was bloody foreign.

'You should have taken it, you know,' said the Captain, suddenly leaning forwards over his sea chart. 'You should have done it.'

Adam Rickerby let me into Paradise without a word. It was midday. I could hear laughter from the kitchen, but made directly for my own room at the top of the house. Climbing the stairs, I realised that Rickerby was following me, and when we came to the floor being decorated I turned and said, 'I'm staying another night.'

'I know,' he said, in his blank-faced way.

I turned and climbed the final staircase, and he climbed it two steps behind. On the attic landing, I turned again and he suddenly seemed enormous, the roof being lower there. I asked his habitual question back at him:

'Can I help you?'

'Aye,' he said, and he was lighting the gas on the little landing.

When the jet was roaring, he turned and held out his hand, saying, 'Two shilling.'

'Don't worry,' I said, 'I'm not going to make off.'

'Who said you were?'

Again, the flash of intelligence.

I paid the money over, and once again he dropped it in his apron pocket. I took my great-coat off, walked into the little room, and put it on the bed. Rickerby looked on from the doorway.

'You've ter put that in t'closet,' he said.

I turned and eyed him. I was minded to tell him to clear off.

'Why? I said.

'It's damp.'

'What of it?'

'Wants airing… You might take a chill.'

'That's my look-out, isn't it? Why are you so interested in trains, Adam?'

'Why are you ' he said, and he stepped into the room. He was bigger than he ought to've been. Something had gone wrong in the making of him. He took another step towards me. I said, 'Go steady now,' but he still came on, and I damn near told him I was a copper, and that he'd better quit the room. But he went right by me, picked up my coat and put it into the closet, threatening to have the whole thing over and setting all the hangers jangling.

'Why do you like train smashes, Adam?' I called after him, as he left the room.

'Because I don't care for trains,' he replied, and I'd broken through at last…

'How do you mean, you'd broken through?' enquired the Captain, as the rattling of the swinging coat hangers was replaced by the sound of the Mate running his hand over his grey beard, the coldness of the chart room, and the gas smell put out day and night by the Gas, Light and Coke Company.

The Captain had brought me up short. I'd barely started again with my recollections. I'd been pleased to have them returning so clear and complete, and I was forgetting that I might have to answer for them; forgetting about the gun that lay on the table, which was not two feet away from me, but it was only six inches from the Captain's right hand. It was a tiny piece, but it would do the job. What was it that Tommy Nugent had said? 'How big a hole do you want to make in their heads, Jim?'

'I don't know,' I said to the Captain.

The Mate smoked a cigar from the tin with the picture of the church on it. He also had before him a plain glass bottle containing a brown spirit of some sort – whisky or rum, not Spanish sherry – and a small glass, which he filled from the bottle pretty regularly. It seemed to be his reward for the ship having reached its destination. But the Captain did not take a drink.

'It was the first obvious connection,' I said. 'The two follow on, do you not see? Why and then because. It proved he wasn't such a blockhead as all that.'

'You thought that he had been making a show?' the Dutchman put in, but it was the Captain who came up with the right word:

'Shamming?' he said.

'I'm not sure.'

'What happened next?'

'I went to down to the kitchen.'

'And?'

In the kitchen, Amanda Rickerby had her hair down (which made her a different kind of beauty) and was brushing it while she sat at the kitchen table, which was crowded with new- bought groceries. Instead of 'hello', she said, 'Mr Fielding is very chivalrously peeling the potatoes,' and he was most unexpectedly working at the sink with his suit-coat off and shirt sleeves very carefully rolled.

'It is extremely unhygienic of me to brush my hair in the kitchen,' Miss Rickerby added, and I saw there was pen and paper in front of her.

'Don't worry on my account,' I said.

'I'm most awfully sorry. I'll stop just as soon as I've finished.'

Vaughan was not present. Adam Rickerby stood by the range, and paid me no mind. He was gazing at his boots, as he was being quizzed by a round, jolly looking woman – evidently Mrs Dawson the daily help.

'How are we off for tinned rhubarb?' she was asking him.

'We've none in,' said Rickerby.

'Prunes?'

'None in.'

'Vanilla essence.'

'Eh?'

'Never mind. Rice?'

'We've none in… I reckon.'

'Ah now, I detected a flicker of hope there, Mrs Dawson,' Howard Fielding said from the sink, moving a quantity of peeled potatoes onto the draining board.

'There,' said Amanda Rickerby, who'd finished brushing her hair, and was putting it up. 'What do you think, Mr Stringer?'

Being so curly, it didn't look much different; but it did look beautiful.

'Good,' I said, thinking: As you know very well.

'Good,' she repeated. 'But I wish there was a looking glass in here.'

'It's not your boudoir, love,' said Mrs Dawson, who was now in the larder. 'And I wish you wouldn't move everything about from one week to the next. I know it's you and not Adam. He's perfectly neat-handed.'

'We should put up a notice,' said Fielding from the sink. '"A place for everything, and everything in its place.'"

He'd turned around now, and was smiling at me, drying his hands on a tea towel and giving me that questioning look of his.

'Yes,' said Amanda Rickerby, 'but where would we put it?'

It was then that I saw the glass of wine – white this time – at her elbow, and not only the glass but the bottle. 'But where would we put it?' she repeated, in a dreamy sort of way. Looking at me, she picked up her pen, and said, 'How about "excellent in quality"?'

But it seemed that she was speaking to Fielding, even though she had her back to him, for he replied,' Superior in quality,' and Amanda Rickerby wrote that down. 'No tinned meat,' he added. 'You have that down?'

Miss Rickerby nodded, more or less to herself. She then said, 'Tariff furnished on application,' and she gave me a lovely, mysterious smile at that. She'd seen that I'd noticed the bottle. It said 'Chablis' on the label, and I could not have pronounced that word but I knew it signified good wine.