The Necropolis Railway (27 page)

In a funny sort of way I went back to sleep and in a funny sort of way I woke up - I did both, I mean, without really doing either. All was the same as before, but I was being shaken in a way that I had been shaken before.

‘I
am on a train,' I said, and I realised that the whispering voice had been mine all along. The rest of it came to me quickly: I was now in Mrs Davidson-Hill's coffin, or Mrs Lampard's, and heading for the grave of the one or the other in Brookwood, and when this knowledge came to me I found I could not suck in enough air to keep alive, and sweat began rolling off me in an instant. I jerked and there was a tearing in the rock, and a great boiling of the blood underneath it. I thrashed at the solid darkness, only I could not thrash. And yet I was not blind, at least, for there was a very thin line of light going all around me like a halo, happily around and around and around like a song being sung. The sight calmed me somewhat, and I started on smaller breaths, which seemed to serve, and with them came a return to the state of semi-sleep into which I let myself go gladly, until I heard my own voice speaking. 'First class,' it said, and I felt the water from my mouth that those two words had produced trickling across my cheek towards the rock, where I stopped being able to feel it.

First class. Saturday Night Mack could be standing guard over me. For a second I could not recall whether he was a bad man or a good man, and then it came to me that he was good, that he was off the hook like the men of the half-link. If I carried on living they could be my friends and my landlady could be my best girl, for this all made my mistake in visiting the night-house seem a very small matter. It was the sort of thing a fellow might do because he was alive, and being alive was good.

I slid my hand under my coat and into my waistcoat pocket. My landlady's advertisement was in there. I wanted to go back to the summer pictures of Grosmont in my head, but Saul Whittaker had gone, and the whole of the North Eastern Railway with him. I was alive until I died, and stuck with it.

The journey to the Necropolis - and the hole in the ground waiting for me there - was one of forty minutes, and I must have had most of those. My one hope was Saturday Night Mack. I slid the advertisement from my pocket, then through the crack of light, and waited. But as the minutes passed a terrible picture came before my mind's eye: of Saturday Night Mack reading
Hoity
Toity
Bits
with the paper so close up to his face that all was quite blocked out but '
prize of an eight-roomed house: anyone can win it and live rent-free for life'.

I felt myself sinking into the softness of the velvet, and becoming rather velvety myself. My head was going away again and I did not mind. I seemed only to be able to breathe out, as though in small soft gasps. I felt a change in the heartbeat of the train, and we came to a stop, and it seemed as though I too had come to a stop. I did not breathe, and I could not tell what was me and what was not me in the world of the coffin.

The train started again, but I was beyond thinking why, or wondering which signal had halted us. Was it the trains that were scared of the horses or the horses that were scared of the trains? The question kept going round and around, and I could not answer it, and it did not matter. There was a train somewhere, far away on the cliffs, but I was down on the beach with a crazy person and the tide coming in. Sometimes I was under it and sometimes on top, but the crazy person it did not affect. After a while I began to be more under it than on top, and I seemed to become uncoupled from the train because it went on its own way, and the question stopped being a question but became just words, before long becoming only sounds, after a while becoming not even that.

The noises slowly returned, becoming words again, but this time they were the words of Saturday Night Mack, muttered between panting breaths, 'Diamonds . . . diamonds
...
big as beans!' he was gasping, but then in a different voice, a worried whisper, he said, 'Half a mo,' and it was with the wrenching cry of a rooster and a great upward surging feeling that I seemed to shoot out of the coffin when the lid came off.

In fact, it was not at all like that: I remained exactly where I was, stuck by blood, watching Saturday Night Mack with his screwdriver in his hand swerve and fall across me before rolling away onto the carriage floor.

The head of Mack came back up after a while, and looked very ill indeed. 'No diamonds,' I said, but I believe it did not sound like that to Mack because of the way that my mouth was.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Wednesday 30 December 1903 -Monday 4 January 1904

I was in a green ward so full of plants it was like a garden. There were three pillars in amongst the plants which in fact were chimneys with firesides front and back. Ladies in white walked between the plants carrying medicines, and the ladies were so beautiful they made the medicines look precious. Other people moved around on wheels, and everybody kept quiet most of the time, but it somehow came to me that I was in St Thomas's Hospital, which was where the London and South Western always took their accident cases if they could. I was in Purvis Ward, called after the sister, Elizabeth Purvis, but which of the beauties she was I could not say, although again it came to me that she had arranged for this ward to have the biggest of the hospital Christmas trees, and that there had been presents from it.

Over my head was an electric light that moved - all for me. All the time beneath my bandages there seemed to be distant violins, which in the middle of the afternoon and the middle of the morning would fade to almost nothing, but at meal times were joined by louder instruments, drums, and the sight of everybody moving much more. But I did not eat for two days.

The side of my head was all sewn, and painted with carbolic. A man came several times to see it. He was called Dr Stone, and I did not like his name in case he hit me over the head with it. Once he came and lifted the gauze and said, 'We had a marathon of sewing with you, Mr Stringer.' There had been so much, they had given me ether - of which I remembered a thing that was rubber with metal behind: a dream machine (for it had given me plenty) that had fitted over my face so well it might have been made for me.

Later Dr Stone told me he had had to do more than just sew me. He had had to dig a hole in my head to pull the bones away from the brain, and I had had more ether for that.

I sat up one morning and there were the Houses of Parliament, with the boats racing back and forth in front of them, all in complete silence. After a while I got the idea that there was a visiting hour, but I went to sleep in the middle of all nonetheless.

The Houses of Parliament had disappeared when I woke up, and there was a supper of boiled ham next to me, along with a glass of beer. There were white screens around my bed, and the electric light was on. I had the feeling of late evening, and of Sister Purvis being close by. Standing at the end of my bed was the Governor, my landlady, and the policeman I had talked to at Nine Elms - the one who looked like a sea captain. Across all the years since then, I have always thought of him as the Captain, and it is possible that he actually was one - a captain of
police,
I mean, because they do have them.

At the moment I opened my eyes, he was looking at my boiled ham and beer so hungrily that he smiled when our eyes met. I started to tell all - for now I seemed to have everything straight - but I had only got over that it was Stanley who had crowned me and put me in a coffin, when they told me to stop, probably because things weren't coming out very clearly.

'Put it down as points,' said the Captain, and his voice was much lighter and less of a growl than I would have guessed. 'Give each point a number.'

They all went away, and a little while later the Captain came back with a pencil and a piece of paper which he put by my bed. It was funny to watch him creep towards me and creep away again, thinking that I was asleep. It was very good paper that he gave me. Across the top it said in fancy letters, 'From St Thomas's Hospital', and I thought about using it to write to Dad. It will just about make his day if I do that, I thought, but then I decided that he would probably not like to learn that I was in hospital, however beautiful the paper.

The next evening the same thing came about, except that I was eating my supper - steak and kidney pudding, this time - when the Captain and the Governor came along. I had my list of points but I think I went from one to three, so they stopped me again.

The third day brought hot pot, and it was all gone and the glass of beer was empty when the Governor and the Captain appeared again, and this time they had a third person with them - a man whose job was to write.

I would have liked to have had my diary by me, but it had gone. Stanley had taken it, along with my replacement pocket book and the brake handle, before putting me in the box. What he would have made of the writings in it I could not guess, for they were mainly scribbles, and mainly, until Stanley got himself in my sights, wrong. I was sure I had everything straight now, in any case.

'Number one,' I said, and I was in high force even before they were settled in their seats, for here was a chance to show my mettle, which I had not been able to get through railway work. 'Number one is Mr Stanley. He looks like a man in want of money, and that is exactly what he is. He speaks on interment for pay, and no other reason, but he was not paid enough. They agreed to keep his address weekly, even though the audiences were so poor, but he wanted more money. I heard him say at the address he gave on the day of Mr Smith's funeral that he had not been in the cemetery for almost four months, and he changed the subject double-quick afterwards. This would have put him there in August, and, I believe, on the afternoon of Wednesday 12 August Mr Stanley did travel to Brookwood - probably not on the funeral train which was running that day, but on a service of the common run from Waterloo.'

'Stopping train to Bournemouth?' said the Captain, and he looked across at the Governor, who just nodded, and who I could tell was anxious on account of the greyness mixed in with the red of his face.

"The week before,' I continued, 'he had asked the board of the Necropolis Company by letter for an increase in pay, but he was refused.'

'How did you know this?' said the Captain, who'd been smiling and smoking a cigar all along and seemed, unlike the Governor, to be a man without a care.

'Because I went into the room at the Necropolis where the minutes are kept.'

'Regular spit-fire of self-dependence,' mumbled the Governor, then, more loudly to the Captain: 'No wonder Mr Smith brought him on!'

'It wasn't lawful to read the Necropolis minutes, though!' said the Captain, but his smile only widened as he did so, and the eye into which the smoke was streaming slowly closed -which I took to mean that I should go on.

'Sir John Rickerby, the chairman, had gone down on the funeral train, and Stanley, I suppose, knew that. Sir John made a habit of walking in the cemetery during his trips down there.'

'Ornithologist?' said the Captain, and he was delighted with that word, which I did not know the meaning of. He was not like a policeman at all.

"The trouble being that he was a creeping Jesus.'

The writer looked up at this, but immediately went back to his scribbling.

'He walked with a stick, I mean,' I continued. 'So Mr Stanley could smash his head
...
I mean the head of Rickerby . . . and it would look . . .' I did not like this talk of head-smashing that was coming from me, and the Captain could see it. He stood up and went away, returning with another glass of beer for me, which I drank while the writer, very mysteriously, continued to write. Maybe he had been so far behind that he needed all of my drinking time to catch up.

'Stanley smashed the head of Rickerby against a tombstone
’
I continued, 'knowing it would look as though he'd fallen.'

The writer wrote; the Governor looked at the Captain. 'On the stone
’
1
said, 'were written the words "Thy Will Be Done.'"

The writer looked up again at this and I put him down as a church-goer.

'This we do know', said the Captain.

'Number two
’
I continued, 'Henry Taylor. Henry Taylor was at the cemetery on that same day.'

I looked at the Governor, who nodded and said, 'Rode out on the Red Bastard with Arthur Hunt and Vincent.'

'It is possible that he took a walk in the cemetery, because Hunt had given him a scolding. He liked the cemetery - Mike told me that - and Arthur Hunt was always chucking people off his engines.'

'You've told me all about this fellow Hunt
’
said the Captain to the Governor.

'Socialist
’
said the Governor, nodding.

'Here is the important connection: I believe Stanley saw Henry Taylor watching him doing the murder of Rickerby, or that's what Stanley thought; Taylor may very well have seen nothing.'

'Carry on
’
said the Captain, and the smile was gone now. The Governor's I had not seen for some time.