The Necropolis Railway (30 page)

'But floorboards not of the best,' I said quietly. My landlady, however, lying beside me on my truckle bed, was fast asleep.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Saturday 9 January

We took the District Railway to West Kensington, where we got off in a great crowd of happy people. We walked out of the station and onto a road packed with cabs. Over the road were the gates of the great outdoor theatre. The benches within were empty, and the curtain was across the stage, but there were posters against all the railings for 'A Tableau of Germania'.

We stopped in front of the posters for a while, which showed castles and some girls in pigtails. 'Do you fancy that?' I said.

'You should really say "them",' said my landlady. 'It's more than one. Anyway, it's not really my sort of thing.' 'Nor mine,' I said.

'And it doesn't come on until March,' said my landlady.
'And
it's eight and six
...'

'And that's for the cheapest seats,' said my landlady.

So that was it as far as 'Tableau of Germania' went. In any case, we were not in West Kensington to see an entertainment; we had come to ride the Great Wheel, and I was going to treat my landlady.

We walked past the theatre and through the Japanese garden, in which there was a tinkling little stream with a bamboo bridge going over. From here we could see the wheel, circling slowly with its forty cabins, and with the steam coming up from the engines at the bottom blowing against the great steel hub. As we watched, the cabins came to rest, and we stopped to look at the top one.

'You get a good long go up there, don't you?' said my landlady.

The Great Wheel started moving again, and so did we.

'Do you think it ever sticks?' asked my landlady.

'It would be nothing to me if it did
’
1
said. I meant because I would be with her, but she took it differently.

'You've found your backbone in all this business, haven't you?'

'Do you not think I had any backbone before?' I said.

'You had an uncommon talent for twitching and looking away,' she said, 'and as for those queer speeches of yours, all about life on the rails
...'

I had told her the whole story, of course, in the house at Hercules Court, dividing the story into the six parts, as in the hospital. She had not said a word until the beginning of part six, when she began to make a pot of tea, but she was still listening, I think. Whenever I tried to go back to it later on, though, even to the most sensational parts, she would cut me off by saying, 'You should put it all in a book.'

With my landlady I felt that I was on the threshold of great things, but not perhaps a very relaxing time. In any event, I was not too young to see that she was good for me.

We were approaching the low, strange buildings under the Wheel, and I realised that some of them were just like the cabins that revolved above. It took two engines to drive the Wheel. The beats from their exhausts were not in time so that it seemed as though they were fighting, but the Wheel turned smoothly all the same.

A lot of the men among the crowd around the bottom of the Wheel were smoking cigars. A barrel organ was playing somewhere. My landlady said that there seemed to be quite a lot of Spanish-looking gentlemen, and there was a little dog twining about that looked like a Pierrot. In the air was a smell of strange spices and fried fish. It was quite a low sort of entertainment that was going on all around, but, still, there were more toppers than anything on the heads of the men - and toppers of the best sort too. A crowd of johnnies on a beano were buying some fried fish from one of the huts, and one of them dropped his. People stopped to look, while another johnny cried out to them all: 'Head full of wine! Head full of wine!'

'He has a head full of wine
’
said my land
lady who was also looking on, ‘b
ut he's rather handsome, nonetheless.'

'Perhaps you would like to go and ask him to pay for your ride on the Wheel
’
1
said.

She laughed, and said, 'You get in the queue. I'm off to buy you a present.'

So I joined the back of the queue, following the lines of my sutures with my fingers.

When my landlady returned, all in a fluster, I was at the front of the queue. One of the forty cabins had just swung down before me, and I was being shown towards it by a man in a blue coat. (All the men who had anything to do with the Wheel were dressed in blue coats.) She handed me a paper bag, and as I took it she kissed me on the cheek that was not sewn. 'It's not the one you like
’
she said, 'but it
is
cocoa.'

'Well, I'm sure I shall like it
’
1
said, and I started to read the words on the tin: it was called 'Vi-Cocoa', which I had never heard of before. 'In tiring work,' I read, 'there is nothing like Vi-Cocoa.'

'Never mind about that, mate,' said the fellow in blue. 'Are you for a turn on the wheel or not?' Then he said, 'What happened to your bonce?'

'Somebody knocked me into the middle of next week
’
I said, at which my landlady suddenly turned to me and said, 'If, two weeks ago, you were knocked into the middle of next week, then what week are you in now?'

It was a good question.

I paid the money and stepped into the cabin. With my beautifully sewn face, my cocoa and the girl I was stuck on, I felt like
...
well, King Edward himself, I would have wagered, was never happier.

Twenty other people or thereabouts were shown into the cabin with us, and as soon as my landlady stepped aboard she said, 'Electric light!' The cabin was like a wide railway carriage with seats along both sides and looking glasses above them. The doors were slammed, the cabin gave a jerk and we began to rise up, but had gone hardly any distance before we stopped again.

'We are neither up nor down,' I said, turning to look out.

'No,' said my landlady, and she was holding my hand very tightly, 'we are up!'

We started to rise once more, and somehow there were violins in my head. I thought: this must b
e the sound that bal
loonists hear all the time. We were above the roofs of the houses now, level with the chimney pots, and then we carried on, rising with the smoke that came out of them. The higher we climbed, the more we saw of their back gardens, and very nice ones they were. I saw my landlady looking at them, and there was an expression on her face that I would almost have called sadness, so I put my arm about her waist and said, 'We will have a garden like that. You can get them out Wimbledon way. I know, because I've seen them.'

We continued to climb, and the large gardens slowly became quite small, and then the whole of West Kensington station could be seen, and the streets beyond going on for miles. Looking down the line of the District, I said, 'You can see the next train to come into the station from London, and the one after that.'

My only disappointment was that I could not see the edge of the city. There was no end to the houses and that was all about it. Our cabin stopped again, and my landlady and I walked towards the windows, for now we were at the top -just in the nick of time, too, because the light was going and the lamps were coming on.

'Look at the lines of electric lights,' said my landlady. "They spread across town like necklaces
...
I wonder whose electricity it is.' That was always one of her strange concerns.

'Can you see Waterloo?' I asked her.

‘I
do not
want
to see Waterloo,' she replied, full of indignation.

Looking down, I could see the crowd around the base of the Great Wheel, and the walkers in the Japanese garden. Beyond the gardens were some tennis players, who looked comical as they dashed about in the gathering darkness, and not at all good at the game, but they were trying their best and my heart was filled with good wishes for them and with love for my landlady.

Then something made me go back to the Japanese garden. A man was walking slowly along one of the paths. He wore a very fine grey felt hat. As I watched, the Japanese lights in the garden around him came on in one soft, swift burst. They were all colours and very pretty but they seemed to have vexed the man in the fine hat, who stopped and looked up at the Great Wheel, then down again, before continuing. He seemed to walk very lightly, almost floating; his clothes were of the latest cut, and I believed he was smoking a cigarette, for he kept bringing his hand to his face. The gentleman was moving towards the bamboo bridge now. Watching him walk was like listening to funny music.

A woman was coming over the bridge towards him, and when the man lifted his hat I expected his hair to spring up, which it did not, and I expected not to see a beard, which I
did.
But he was Rowland Smith all the same.

My landlady was saying,
‘I
think I can see St Paul's! But if that is St Paul's then
that
can't be the Houses of Parliament.'

He has put Brilliantine on his hair and grown a beard so as to start again as a new person, I thought quite calmly as our cabin began rolling past the buildings at the base of the Wheel and the Japanese garden disappeared from view. We began to climb again, far too slowly, and with the garden gone I became sure I had made a mistake. But here was the Japanese scene again, and, yes, there was evil and not just sadness behind the mysteries of the Necropolis, and I had a dizzy sense of beginning a fall that has lasted me, in a way, the rest of my days.

For there was Smith again on the bamboo bridge, with his hat back on his head, the lady far away.

I called to my landlady, so loudly that everyone in the cabin took fright.

She came over, saying, ‘I
s it your head?'

I said, 'Look down there. You see that man with the beard on the little bridge?'

She nodded; she was anxious now. I had taken away all her fun and the others in the cabin were all looking at us.

'That is Rowland Smith,' I said.

"The one who's dead, you mean?'

"The one who
w
as
dead.'

I saw all the bad shots I'd made in hospital over this business, and for these I immediately blamed the ether. But I was now haring down a second trail, and I turned to my landlady and started on what must have seemed to her the queerest of all my speeches: 'Mack's little friend who could not grow a moustache told me in the bar of the North Station at the Necropolis that corpses had been dug up, and some left lying about the place. Mack - well, it had to be him; he was on the fly as everybody knew - would have been under orders to find the body of a man the size of Smith; others he could abandon, knowing they'd be put down to the work of grave robbers. He would have been well paid for it. Why, he told me in the Citadel that he was poor as a rat, but he was always in funds, and those brain dusters in the Kingdom of Italy did not come cheap.'

'What are you talking about?' said my landlady.

'But no,' I said. 'Smith lived in a flat, with a gatekeeper at the door. The coroner's report had said so. How could a body be got in?'

My landlady, still looking down at Smith, had somehow caught up with me.
‘I
thought,' she said slowly, 'that when you told me of that coroner's report, you said the firemen had played their hoses through doors giving on to a garden.'

'You're right!' I said.
‘I
hadn't thought you were listening. Not long before, Smith bought a new flat -
1
heard him telling Erskine Long so - and he'd done it for one reason only: to get a garden!'

In my mind's eye I saw the swanky flat with the beautiful garden facing away from the road. I saw Mack, with some of his friends who were out of the straight, turning up after dark with the right sort of dead man after leaving some of the wrong sort lying about in Brookwood or other places. Maybe he had brought paraffin too. I saw Smith, talking of being tired to the gatekeeper. I saw him light the fire and leave.

'But why did Smith
do
it?' I exclaimed, at which some of the others in the cabin who'd left off staring at us began to do so again.

The Great Wheel rolled upward once again, and my thoughts roamed as wide as the view from our cabin, a hundred ideas coming into my mind. I revolved in my mind the words that Vincent had used of Smith on the coal heap at Nine Elms, and the sort of scandal that might go along with it. That I did not like to mention in front of my landlady. I was now at a height to see where the buildings merged into grey greenness at the edge of the city, and this brought the land sales flooding into my thoughts.