Andrew Martin: Death on a Branch line

‘Well, it’s corn, at any rate,’ I said.

‘I know that,’ she said.

She put the paper up again, but I knew I’d been forgiven.

She was glad of a holiday of any sort, and the beauty of the scene beyond the window was winning her over. I fished in my bag for the beer bottle I knew was in there. I found it wrapped inside the blue and green sporting cap I’d bought for the week-end from Walton and Reed’s of York. At Adenwold I would wear it in place of my bowler. I thought the cap went well with my new blue twill summer suit, but the wife did not approve of Walton and Reed’s. She held that it had been all right as Walton’s, but had gone off with the arrival of Reed. Their rig-outs were now too raffish. But this cap had been marked down from five bob to two, and, as I’d explained to the wife, it was specially tailored so that it could be folded up very flat and placed in an inside coat pocket.

‘Good,’ she’d said. ‘You can put it in your pocket and keep it there.’

There was a bit more rummaging — and a bit of a panic — until I could put my hands on the clasp knife with its bottle opener attachment. The stuff was warm as tea, but I’ll take my beer anyhow. I then fished out of my kitbag the book that Lydia had brought home for me a few weeks before: The Student’s Guide to Railway Law by M. E. Chapman, MA, LLD Cambridge — this in hopes that I might leave the railway police and train up as a solicitor. I read the familiar first sentence: ‘This book is intended to present in ordinary language, and as clearly as possible free from technical terms, a general view of the main features of the subject.’

That was a laugh.

I turned to the page about the Railway Fires Act, 1905. There were at least sixty-eight sections in that Act, and it was a sight too many. I put away the book, and took out the sheaf of papers that Hugh Lambert had dropped from the carriage window. There were about forty in all, not numbered, and I reckoned I was missing a dozen from the original bundle. The writing was tiny. I could make it out, but it was very hard going. I read: The fire was never sufficiently banked for her. The housemaid, who had been perfectly good at making fires, was all of a sudden deemed incompetent. Not that mother would ever tell her so, of course. Instead, she called Ponder or I in to put on more fuel while she sat shivering on a mild afternoon in her cardigan. I would have been eight or nine, not yet a schoolboy. The blanket was on her knees in the morning room in summer, and then still there in the summer. This was the time that Ponder and I became ‘my boys’, to be spoken of as such at every opportunity, and that certainly did alarm me. It was gushing, and that was not mother. Ponder knew it too, of course, and so he burrowed deeper into his books.

I looked up.

Who was ‘Ponder’? Must be the brother: John.

I wondered whether the papers held one especially important bit of information; at the moment they seemed a sort of rag-bag of memories. I thought of the scene in the carriage, after Lambert had slipped the papers through the window. The guards would have come down hard upon him for that, but what could they do? You couldn’t hang a man twice.

The wife was looking directly back at me.

‘What’s that?’ she said, indicating the bundle.

‘Just some papers.’

‘Work papers?’

‘I found them under the tracks, just under the north signal gantry.’

‘Hard up for reading matter, are you? Because you ought not to be

…’

She was referring to The Student’s Guide to Railway Law.

She caught up her paper again, and I looked at the headings on the back page: ‘The Question of Non-Union Men — Demonstration in York’; ‘Insurance Bill — Friendly Societies Alienated’; ‘Plan for Reform of the House of Lords — Prime Minister to See The King’; ‘Ballot in Favour of a Strike’; ‘Riots in Liverpool’; ‘Giant Leeds Blaze — Firemen Run for Their Lives’; ‘The Moroccan Sensation — Reports of a Further Grave Incident’.

‘Mr Balfour’s gone on holiday,’ said the wife from behind the paper. ‘He left Victoria this morning for Gastein. When he returns to Britain, he’s off to Scotland to play golf.’

Mr Balfour was not in government. Therefore he was unable to do anything to bring about women’s suffrage, not that he would if he could. The Women’s Movement had no time for Mr Balfour, but their principal hatred was directed at Mr Asquith who, being the prime minister, could do something about votes for women but didn’t seem inclined to. ‘Today,’ the wife was saying as she lowered the paper, ‘Harry asked me, “Why have the Germans sent a panther to Agadir?”’

Harry was our boy. He was nigh-on seven years old, and a lovely lad, but the reason the wife had been looking forward to this week-end most particularly was that her friend Lillian Backhouse had agreed to take him in until Monday dinner-time.

‘He thought it was a real panther?’ I enquired.

‘I told him it was a boat, of course.’

‘A gun boat, I hope you said.’

The wife looked out of the window, watching the rolling fields, and keeping silence. Then she said, ‘What do you think I told him? That it was a flipping canoe?’

‘Well, I hope you told him all about the Moroccan crisis,’ I said.

‘What I can’t make out’, said the wife, who did not keep up with the foreign news, ‘is why Agadir?’

‘Because it’s a port in Morocco, and this is all the Moroccan Crisis.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘It’s the second Moroccan Crisis as a matter of fact.’

‘When was the last one?’

‘About five years since.’

The wife frowned.

‘It crops up periodically,’ I said, taking a pull on my beer. ‘You see, the French and the Spanish run Morocco. We let them do that…’

‘That’s not like us.’

‘Well, there’s nothing there — just sand and terrific heat. But Germany’s always wanted to get a leg in as well.’

‘Are there soldiers on this boat, then?’

‘There’s believed to be a brass band on it, I know that.’

‘And are they threatening to strike up?’ the wife said, picking up the paper again.

We stopped at Slingsby in order for nothing to happen. A lad porter was cleaning the waiting-room windows, and signs running half-way along the platform read: ‘Do Not Alight Here’. I called to the lad and asked if he wouldn’t mind nipping along to the guard’s van to ask for the Adenwold stop. He said he would do, and disappeared from view.

We rolled on, and I might have slept again. I looked out just as the great dark sail of a windmill came close to the compartment window, and we were into a tunnel of trees. Two screams on the whistle as we ran through the woods; then the carriage gave a jolt as an application of the brake came, and we were going slowly through a clearing. In the centre of it stood a great steam saw with stacks of logs near by. Around the saw, the trees had been felled at all angles, and it looked as though they’d collapsed into a dead faint at the sight of the machine. The dark wood came in on us again as we closed on the station.

‘Adenwold,’ I said to the wife as a platform came into view.

We’d come in amid a slow hurricane of dust. I opened the door of the compartment, and we climbed down. The place was not as I had expected: somebody had picked up the village of my imagination, turned it around, removed some houses, added a lot of trees and made the air hotter, thicker and more orange-coloured. For a moment, the two of us stood still on the platform, watching a single cloud from the locomotive unwind through the stagnant air. There wasn’t much to Adenwold, or to the little station. There was no station canopy, and even though it was eight o’clock at night I had to shield my eyes against the glare of the low sun.