The Necropolis Railway (11 page)

She had put her hair to rights; the style was complicated but most effective. 'You forgot to put out your washing again,' she said.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Would it be too late to do it now?'

'I'm just about to drain the boiler.'

'Oh.'

She was looking all around the room, as if she had never set eyes on it before, but I was interested to see that she did not once look at the water on the floor. Should I say that it was a little hard to be paying six shillings a week, with a pound down, for a place with a puddle next to the bed? I was struggling for the right words here when she thrust a piece of paper at me, saying, 'Mr Stringer, would you be so kind as to post this somewhere about the premises of your railway company? It is an advertisement.'

'Yes,' I said, 'I would be very pleased to. Do you mind if I read it?'

She shook her head.

'Unusually excellent furnished bed and sitting room with garden view offered to respectable person,' I read aloud. 'One minute from Waterloo Station. No servants kept, every comfort and convenience. Very moderate terms.'

'Well?' she said.

'What room is this concerning?' I said.

"The one alongside this one, of course,' she said.

"The one with the looking glass?' I said.

'It has a very
pretty
looking glass,' she said. 'Ought I to mention that?'

'You've put down "No servants kept",' I said, 'but -'

'I am not a servant,' she said, most indignantly.

'No,' I said, 'of course not. I only meant that your terms do include laundry.'

‘I
will wash clothes,' she said,
'if
they are put out.'

‘I
think it's an excellent notice,' I said, handing back the paper, 'unusually excellent, in fact, and I know just the spot for it at Nine Elms.' I had in mind the noticeboard in the timekeeper's office. I put the notice into my waistcoat pocket, and my eyes drifted once again to the water on the floor. I noticed that my landlady's had done the same. 'I wonder what causes the water on the floor?' I said.

'A broken roof,' she said.

She was certainly very direct. She walked into the room and put the toe of her boot into the puddle in a very hypnotising way. She looked up at me and her face was caught mysteriously between smiling and not. 'It's the trains have loosened the tiles on the roof,' she said. 'What I call the dray-horse engines do it - those fearful draggers that bring the heavy waggons over the arches and set every house in the district shaking.'

'You mean the slow-goods?' I said.

She did not seem very sure of that.

I somehow took her to mean that she fancied the expresses at any rate, and I asked if that was true.

'Well,' she said,
‘I
suppose I do. If I have to go to Bournemouth then I wish to go in a hurry.'

'You've been there?' I said, 'On excursions?'

She nodded.

"The Greyhounds can do it in two hours,' I said.

'Well, ours took four on the last occasion,' she said, walking rapidly towards the door as though I personally had been responsible for the slowness of her journey to the sea.

'High speed is my passion,' I said, to try and stop her going.

'But you are presently retained
...
not as a driver?'

'As a cleaner,' I said eagerly, 'but cleaning is the way to driving, did I not tell you that when I arrived at this lodge?'

She nodded quickly, and said, "The subject of trains is of great interest to some people - or so I would imagine.'

And then she was gone, but the puddle was still there on the floor.

Chapter Eleven

Monday 30 November

For the following week I had the worst turn of the lot: the five o'clock in the morning go-on. On my first day of early turns, which was Monday 30 November, there was more coming and going in the shed than I had seen at any later hour, with 200 locomotives under the roof, and the fires were being started on all sides. The men were stoking up the whole of London, setting the world turning for another day, and by their looks they seemed to say they could manage the job quite well without me.

I went in to see the Governor first thing. As Nolan scribbled away, the Governor said he was giving me a rest from Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One for a while, for there weren't enough funerals. This was no great shock: those two only went out three or four times a week in any case. He put me on to general tidying and making straight, and as I was leaving he called out, 'Watch yourself off-shed today. It's thick as a bag out there.'

I walked back to the mouth of the shed, and saw that the dawn had come but it had been one of those frauds, where too much blackness makes way for too much whiteness. I couldn't even make out the turntables. A bell was being rung behind me, echoing in the shed. A couple of engines were coming off-shed, rolling out on the tracks to either side of me, big as black clanking houses on the move and giving me a sheer blank fright as they swept strangely past, proving the power of the fog, which swallowed them in an instant. A minute after, I heard an explosion.

A man to my left threw off his cap and began to run. On Filey Beach when I was twelve, my dad offered me a sporting challenge: first to touch the spars of Lighthouse Pier from a hundred yards off. For the first time my father did not let me win, and I saw what a man could do, even a little, sometimes-silly butcher in a brown billycock. This fellow was faster than my dad. He was leaping the rails, flying across the front of the fog, then disappearing diagonally into it. A crowd was coming up behind me to watch, and I turned around and saw Crook. It was a shock to see him away from his clock. 'Detonation,' he said to me, and his eyebrows did their little jump.

Detonators were put on the tracks as a back-up for signals on foggy days, and an explosion meant an engine had struck one. I didn't breathe as I awaited the sound of a smash, which was like waiting for death itself, because there was curiosity and horror too. I believed smashes came as the sound of a great bell being rung, and now I was about to find out for myself. But thirty seconds went by and we heard nothing, and I felt I ought to be doing more than standing there and waiting, so I stepped away from the shed.

I knew, once in the middle of the fog, that the bad business wasn't over. There were shouts, lamps swinging, the sound of people scrambling forward, then stopping. I was hard by the locomotive now, and I saw it was an engine commonly called a Jubilee, one of the two that had rolled out of the shed beside me. There were men all around it, with more crammed onto the footplate. A man was being moved around in there, propped up, turned about, and I could see the little ambulance box being passed across from one fellow to another. Then I saw the head of the man being moved: it was Mike's, and it was all wrong; blue, like a bad potato.

The body that was connected to the head flopped - the legs were for a second forgotten, and dangled from the cab - and it seemed too small, although in fact it was the head that was too big. But it scarcely mattered either way: the two could not remain connected for very much longer, since the one would henceforward want nothing to do with the other.

Now there was a fellow coming up from behind who said, 'Did you hear the barker?' Somebody else I didn't know said,

'That's what we all heard.' 'No,' said a voice that could have been the first one, 'we heard the shooter and the fog bomb blowing off together.' Another said, 'There was no shooter. He just came off the bloody engine.'

I looked up. Arthur Hunt was leaning against the Jubilee's tender and staring at me as if he'd never left off doing it from that time I'd first seen him in the half-link's mess. The dirty business done, the fog was clearing all the time, racing away. Barney Rose was at the other end, next to the cylinder casing. He had his pipe going, but looked rattled all the same, and I knew I should have left him alone, but I couldn't. I had come to a place that was full of hatred. One man had disappeared and another had died, and this last was a good deal more popular than myself. It wasn't bravery that made me walk towards Rose; it was something like what they call the life force itself.

The fog may have been lifting but the Jubilee was giving out whiffs of steam, and there was Rose's pipe smoke to add to the morning ghostliness. When he spoke he looked away from me. 'I was under orders from the Governor to let Mike take her off-shed,' he said, 'just while I walked along her and took a good look at the motion . . . something a bit queer about the noise it was making
...'
He left a long pause, then he started again, still looking away: 'He was like Taylor and like you: a very ardent lad.'

He gave a funny little sideways smile that made me feel ill, and I said, 'What do you
mean?'
I suppose I was shouting, but the fog seemed to require it.

'No holds barred,' said Rose, shaking his head and seeming nearly to laugh. Another bloke came up to us, and Rose carried on talking, still with that hateful half smile. 'Well, Mike being new to the regulator, and a little heavy-handed with it, I got left behind. I never saw him hit the fog bomb, only heard it, and when I got nearer he was flat out by the track, with the engine heading away for bloody Bournemouth at ten miles to the hour. He'd come off the footplate and hit the next rail.' He looked up at the two of us, then down again. 'Talk about beginner's luck,' he said.

Beyond and above us, on the footplate of the engine, I could make out that they were still holding Mike, still turning him this way and that as if he might somehow come back to life if they got him at the right angle.

'How did he come off?' said a voice.

'Tripped on coal, if you ask me
’
said Rose.

I remembered that I had seen Mike's messy ways with the shovel for myself.

A lantern was coming towards us; behind it was a man coughing - the Governor. 'It's Florence fucking Nightingale
’
said a sharp voice - the voice of Arthur Hunt. Mike was being brought down off the footplate, and somebody was shouting, roaring angrily. The Governor yelled something to Rose, then leapt onto the footplate of the Jubilee. Rose followed him up more slowly, looking completely all in. Two minutes later the engine began rolling backwards towards the shed. Rose was at the regulator, and the Governor was looking out at all the blokes. "The impedimentia of illusion are being removed from the stage!' he roared, by which he meant get back to our duties.

A shout went up - many intemperate words, and all against the Governor. I wasn't one of the shouters but it made me feel good to be part of the crowd. For the first time I was a Nine Elms man. Well, I mean
...
it was for once not myself but another who was the object of hatred. 'Get that fucking slave driver off there
’
said a voice from the crowd of men, which could have been Hunt again, but I could not be sure. Then I saw the swinging bulls' eyes of the constables coming up, and I thought: it is very like the end of the shows in the music halls with the chuckers-out coming in, and I remembered Mike's legs hanging off the side of the cab, and how they were like Mr Punch's little broken legs that would sometimes flop over the front of the small stages in the seaside booths, making you sorry for him in spite of all. But Mike was a good fellow to begin with, in my eyes at least; Taylor had been another by all accounts, and maybe that was part of the killer's programme, to get the nice ones, in which case I had better stop playing the milksop.

The coppers took the numbers of the blokes around the loco, and asked everybody what they'd seen. Two hours later a detective with a white beard who looked like a sea captain, accompanied by the Governor, came to see me while I was ripping rags on my own in the rag store, and I told them everything I knew and nothing of what I thought - because I could have given them quite a bit to chew on.

The Governor called me a good lad, and started coming on strong about the half-link blokes right in front of the detective. He said that Rose was not up to the mark, that there would be an inquiry, and it would be the finish of him. He also said that Rose had overrun in the yard at the start of August, which I'd already heard from Vincent, who'd said somebody had split over it, and now the Governor, working up to boiling point in the rag store, came out with the name. 'It was that poor sod Henry Taylor who spilled the beans to me - it was his job to do it, but look what happened to him. He was a good lad too - would have been up on the footplate in double-quick time.'

By now his colour had reached the danger level, and he started coughing, as the detective, who seemed to know of all this anyway, smiled, and told him to calm himself.