Andrew Martin - The Last Train to Scarborough

'You either are or you aren't,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'I mean, it ought not to require thought.'

I was fairly burning up with embarrassment. But Mrs Dawson had hardly looked up from her pencil and note pad while making her remark; Fielding was taking the corkscrew to another bottle; Adam Rickerby was stirring a pot; Theo Vaughan was biting his long thumbnail while reading, and the one little pointer on the gas meter that moved around fast was moving around just as fast as ever.

'No,' I said, 'I'm not,' and the cork came out as Fielding said, 'Oh dear.'

'What's up?' said Vaughan, looking up.

'It's corked,' said Fielding.

'It was,' said Vaughan, 'but now you've taken the cork out.'

'No, I mean the cork has crumbled,' said Fielding.

'What's the harm?' said Vaughan, turning the page of the paper. 'You weren't thinking of putting it back in, were you?'

'You don't seem to understand,' said Fielding.

I had betrayed Lydia my wife: our eleven years together, our children… I told myself I'd done it in order to keep in with Miss Amanda Rickerby. I had done it for the sake of the investigation, and no other reason. She was on the marry and it was important for me to keep her interest in me alive in order to acquire more data. Amanda Rickerby was grinning at me, and I believed she knew. Yes, she knew all right.

I drained my glass, sat back and said, 'You say that Blackburn jumped into the sea, but would that really have killed him? Just to jump in off the harbour wall?'

'I'll tell you what it wouldn't have done, Jim,' said Vaughan, still looking over Sporting Life. 'It wouldn't have warmed him up:

'Lucifer matches, Mr Stringer,' said Amanda Rickerby. 'You can suck the ends and then you'll die. Perhaps he did that.'

'While he was bobbing about in the sea, you mean?' asked Vaughan. 'And you have to suck every match in the box, you know.' 'My dad', said Miss Rickerby, 'did it by drinking a bottle of spirits every day for forty years.'

'Yes, and you think on about that, Amanda dear,' said Mrs Dawson. 'I don't like to see wine on the table so early in the day.'

'It's a special occasion, Mrs Dawson,' said Amanda Rickerby, and she rose to her feet. With a special smile in my direction, she said, 'Won't be a minute,' and quit the room.

Theo Vaughan was still sticking his finger into the tin of Golden Syrup.

'I like treacle,' he said.

'Evidently,' Fielding put in.

'I like it on porridge,' said Vaughan.

'That would be sacrilege to the Scots,' said Fielding.

'If you put it into porridge,' said Vaughan, 'it allows you to see into the porridge.'

'Very useful I'm sure,' said Fielding.

'It goes like the muslin dresses of the ladies on the beach when the sun is low. They're sort of.'…'

'They are transparent, Vaughan,' said Fielding.

'Noticed it yourself, have you?'

'I have not!

'Mr Vaughan, please remember there are ladies present,' said Mrs Dawson. But in fact she herself was the only one in the room at that moment, and she was putting on her coat and gloves, at which I saw my opportunity.

'I'll show you to the door, Mrs Dawson,' I said. Once out in the hallway, I said, 'Very good house, this. It's a credit to you – and to the boy.'

'He's a bit mental, the poor lamb,' Mrs Rickerby said, fixing her wrap, 'but he does his best.' 'I'm thinking of trying to help him in some way. I know he has a strong interest in railways…

She eyed me. The clock ticked. I couldn't keep her long, since she was evidently over-heating in her coat and wrap.

'I know he likes to read about them,' I said, 'or to be read to about them.'

'I've read to him on occasion,' said Mrs Dawson, 'when we've done our chores of a morning.'

'About what exactly?'

She kept silence for a moment, reaching for the latch of the door. I opened the door for her.

'Youth cut to death by express train,' she said. 'Collision in station, engine on platform. Driver killed, fireman scalded. Car dashes onto level crossing as train approaches… He knows his letters well enough to spot a railway item in the newspaper, and then everything has to stop while you read it out.'

'Why?'

'Why? It's just how he is. It's how his condition takes him. He's a very simple lad, is Adam. He has this house, which he tries to keep up. He did have Peter…'

'Peter?'

'His cat that died.'

The rain made a cold wind as it fell onto Bright's Cliff.

'… And he has his little boat,' Mrs Dawson added.

'Oh? Where's that?'

'Sometimes in the stables over the road, sometimes on the beach, sometimes in the harbour.'

'How does he move it about?'

'On a cart.'

'He goes in for a bit of sailing, does he?'

'It's a rowing boat.'

In the kitchen I'd thought Mrs Dawson a kindly woman, which perhaps she was, but she didn't seem to have taken to me and I wondered whether she was the first person in Paradise to have guessed that I was a spy. Or was it just that – being married herself and a woman experienced in the ways of men – she'd somehow known I was lying about not having a wife?

As Mrs Dawson stepped out into the rain, I heard a footfall on the dark stairs. Amanda Rickerby was coming down, and I returned with her in silence to the kitchen, which was a less homely place without Mrs Dawson. It was too hot and everyone looked red. Vaughan was moving some pots and pans aside so that he could get at the beer barrel again; Fielding remained with his back to the sink with arms folded and head down, evidently lost in a dream, but he looked up as we walked in, and Adam Rickerby approached his sister, carrying the fish in its baking pan.

She said, 'Oh dear, Adam love, it's over-cooked.'

She drew towards her another dish.

'The only thing for it,' she said, 'is to break it up, put it in this, and make a pie.'

'A pie?' he fairly gasped, and he looked all about in desperation. As he did so, it was Fielding's turn to quit the room. In the interval of his absence, Amanda Rickerby played with a salt cellar, completely self-absorbed, as it seemed to me; Vaughan pulled at his 'tache and read his paper, and Adam Rickerby fell to tidying the kitchen with a great clattering of crockery and ironmongery. When Fielding returned a few minutes later, the lad was arranging the objects on the table: he wanted the knife polisher in a line with the vegetable boiler, the toast rack, the big tea pot, and so on.

'Adam, love,' said his sister, 'don't take on. I'm just going to ask Mr Stringer about summer trains, I'll see to the cooking in a moment.'

'It's too late,' he said. 'It'll be tea time any minute.'

'Well, stop moving things about, anyhow.'

'I en't movin' things about,' said Adam Rickerby. 'I'm movin' 'em back!

So saying, he walked directly through the door that gave onto the scullery, and I heard the opening and closing of a further door, indicating that he had gone into his own quarters at the back of the house.

'If luncheon is off then so am I,' said Vaughan, rising to his feet.

'Mr Stringer,' Fielding enquired from his post at the sink, 'will you come upstairs now for that cigar?'

And I somehow couldn't refuse him.

In the ship room the gas had not been lit, and the fire was low. Fielding, who entered in advance of me, was stirring it as I walked up to the left hand window and watched the storm. The wine and the earlier beer had made my head bad, and I had a half a mind to lift the sash and let in the wind and flying rain. I was in no mood for smoking a dry cigar but it would be a way of getting at Fielding. Or did he want to get at me?

He set down the poker and brought the cedar-wood box over. There were just two short cigars rolling about inside. The Spanish sherry, I noticed, was waiting on the small bamboo table. He poured two glasses, and we both drank. I saw for the first time that he wore a signet ring on his right little finger.