The Underground Man (22 page)

By eight o'clock this morning we were on the platform at Worksop station with time enough to stand and watch the train come rolling in. There was an unholy commotion of steam and brakes before it juddered to a halt and blocked out what little light had previously illuminated the place. I was helped up into my carriage by Clement, who then heaved himself and the baggage in after me; he swung my cases easily up onto the racks and generally fussed about the place. I must say I had not expected the carriage to be so luxuriously fitted-out. The last time I travelled by train it was little more than a wooden box with a leaking roof, but now there are curtains and cushions and carpets and even a mirror in which to comb one's hair.

I had on my William IV coat with its high moon pockets and deep collar and a letter of introduction from Mellor tucked away somewhere. On the seat beside me I placed my knapsack which had in it a vegetable pie, some fruit and pastries and a flask of hot sweet tea. It had been my intention to travel to Edinburgh alone and to stand on my own two feet, but I had come under pressure from various quarters to allow Clement to come along. It was Mrs Pledger who pointed out that my shirts and trousers would need pressing after spending the best part of a day crammed in their cases,
and that though there may be no end of boot-cleaners in our hotel there is slim chance they will know one end of a boot from the other. So I relented, on the strict understanding that he travel up in a separate carriage and generally keep out of sight, so that anyone coming upon me these next few days might think me a regular and independent man about town.

Clement was now back on the platform, checking departure times with various railwaymen and working himself up into a right old state. And now he was back in the carriage and checking me for the journey and now very reluctant to close the door.

I shooed him away with my cane until he finally relinquished the door. Then a guard came along and slammed it shut and Clement loped off to his own carriage. Then somewhere down the platform a whistle was blown and a second later the whole contraption made an awful lurch, followed by a series of smaller, more frequent lurches until my tiny, fancily-furnished room began to carry me away. I poked my head out of the window to watch the station slide by and saw Clement two carriages back down the train, looking anxiously up at me. I shouted at him to put his head in and eventually he did as he was told. I suppose he just wants to be sure of me. But he needn't have worried for I had my floating boy for company.

The engine dragged us through the town, coughing and spluttering most unhealthily, but gradually managed to clear its lungs and soon we were out of Worksop and generally flying along. The wheels squealed on the tracks beneath me like little pigs and through the window the hills took to rising and falling in great earthy waves and, what with farms and cows slipping past as if on greased wheels, I must admit I began to feel a little sick. Drew the curtains to try and quell the queasiness and took deep breaths until some composure had been regained.

Clement had taken the precaution of fixing a sign to my door which read

so that passengers waiting to board at stations along the way would be discouraged from barging in on me.

Well, we seemed to call in on just about every town and village in the North of England; forever pulling to or pulling away. There was a little porthole by the curtained window and at the first few stations I stood on the seat and peered out to watch the people come and go. Huge trunks were being wheeled in every direction and there were kisses and handshakes and embraces and much waving of handkerchiefs as we set off. But I soon tired of spying on these anonymous leave-takings and as the stations grew steadily further apart I slipped slowly into a not unpleasant torpor.

An hour or two later, I ate some pie.

Although I was very nicely curtained-away and cordoned-off, at every stop the station's noises still bundled their way in. Countless calls of ‘Take care!' and ‘Write … Promise to write!' came through to me, along with ‘Give my love to suchandsuch …' – all punctuated by the shrill comma of the guard's whistle and the clatter of slamming doors.

I found myself unintentionally eavesdropping on these hurried farewells and began to note how, mingling with the voices of the returning Scots, one could make out the local accents and how, as we ventured further north, these slowly shifted from one brogue to the next.

The boy in the bubble floated up by the luggage rack with his back turned most defiantly towards me. I thought perhaps he bore me a grudge of some sort; an idea which I proposed to him, but which received no reply. He is not a very talkative chap.

We had been travelling for several hours and I was
beginning to feel thoroughly bored. So bored, in fact, that while I knew we were still a good way from Edinburgh, I resolved to leave the curtains open at the next stop and as we sped across a viaduct I slipped my arm out of the open window and removed the sign which Clement had fixed to the door. I told myself that if Fate decides that I should have travelling companions then so be it. I had a sudden desire to be in the company of my fellow man.

By Newcastle my fellow man had taken the shape of a young mother and her twins (a boy and girl, aged about five years old) and a severe-looking chap in his fifties with an over-waxed moustache. My hopes of some camaraderie between fellow travellers were dashed immediately: the young woman was almost too exhausted to lift her children up onto the seats and the attitude of the gentleman who sat down next to me made it quite plain that conversation was the last thing on his mind. After our initial greetings I think not a single word was exchanged. The children were the epitome of good behaviour, only piping up once or twice, but each time met by a vicious glance from the evil Moustache Man. So imposing was his presence that I became aware how my own gaze had rationed itself to the smallest plot of carpeted floor, my eyes barely daring to stray from it. At the time I wondered (as indeed I wonder now) how we can allow one person to get away with so wilfully and malevolently imposing himself on a situation and generally poisoning the atmosphere. Perhaps it is the strangeness of modern travel which cultivates such dismal isolation in its human freight.

The train brought us right alongside the North Sea, which was a wonderful brackeny-brown and so utterly sharp and shiny it looked to have been hacked out of flint. If I had been on my own I might have opened up the window and drawn great draughts of the sea air into me. As it was, all five of us
stared rather balefully at it before returning our gazes to their prison cells.

Soon after, one of the twins let out a terrific yawn, totally debilitating its little owner. It was then a wonder to see the speed at which the same condition struck down the rest of us, though we adults hid ours behind raised palms and subjected them to such terrible compression as to squeeze all the pleasure out of them. Even so, the young one's yawn swept round the carriage like a contagious infection, bouncing from seat to seat just like a ball. And very soon, we all found ourselves vacant-eyed and full of sighs, as we surrendered to the motion of the train. And we adults were all slowly reduced to infants, each one of us rocked in our mother's arms, so that while we failed to come together in conversation in the first place we found ourselves united in sleep at the last.

A free day before visiting Professor Bannister so Clement and I spent the morning touring the town. As we trailed up and down the windy streets, going from tea-house on to tailor, I noticed how strangely everybody appears to be dressing these days – hats and collars so meanly cut. Felt quite old-fashioned and over-fancy in my burnous and tall hat and my shirt with its double frill.

After lunch, on Mellor's recommendation, we visited the famous Camera Obscura, which is right at the top of the High Street just outside the Castle gates. It is a chubby sort of tower, a little like a lighthouse, but has a half-timbered air about it and a wholly wooden hat.

Mellor had become highly animated when telling me about the place, saying how he never visited Edinburgh without calling in at the Camera. So, having located it, we went straight in and up to a tiny counter where I paid our pennies to a woman dressed from head to toe in tweed. She congratulated us on choosing such a breezy day for our visit as all the morning cloud had been blown away, thereby guaranteeing, she insisted, a particularly spectacular show. Heartened by this news we set off up the stone steps – hundreds of them, there were, like marching to the top of the world– to emerge, at last, on a high terrace where three other gentlemen stood, smoking and taking in the view. And what a prospect! – so grand and gratifying it alone was worth the effort and the entrance fee.

The Camera shares the Castle's great chunk of rock, so we had an almost perfect panorama of the vertiginous city below.

‘So many spires,' I said to Clement, who nodded vaguely in reply.

Indeed, there looked to be one on just about every street corner, puncturing the firmament. The nearest clouds were banked up on the horizon several miles away and the sky was a most heavenly hue, lending all the roofs and churches an even frostier sharpness and making one's eyes prickle with delight. I had counted well over a dozen spires and steeples and had plenty more to go, when the woman in tweed (and a magnificent pair of brogues, I might add) came puffing up the steps.

‘This way, gentlemen, if you please,' she announced.

She opened up a door off the terrace and waved us into a wooden room, which from the outside looked like a tall windowless gazebo or a bathing-machine with the wheels removed.

Now, I must admit that as we were herded towards that tiny room I had not the least idea what to expect. The Reverend Mellor, whilst heartily promoting the Camera
Obscura and even endeavouring to describe the mechanics involved, had left me with no abiding notion as to what the occasion might actually entail. So, finding myself in a small round room with only a high ceiling to distinguish it, I will admit I was a trifle disappointed. If we were to bear witness to a visual demonstration of the magnitude and beauty which the Reverend had led me to expect, then surely, I mused, some major gadgetry would have to be drafted in.

As these thoughts drifted around my head the woman in tweed closed the door behind her, then took a minute or two to introduce us to the basic principles of the Camera. I was not overly impressed and took some satisfaction from seeing another chap stifle a yawn. But when she reached over and began to dim the lamps I was suddenly all eyes and ears as it dawned on me I might be about to endure another session as claustrophobic as the one in Mellor's cave. So in those last moments before we were completely engulfed in darkness I made quite sure I had located the door's precise whereabouts, in case I was gripped by another fearful attack and had to make a sudden and embarrassing dash for it. ‘Small wonder this is such a favourite of Mellor's,' I thought to myself, as my stomach tied itself in a familiar panicky knot and the darkness swept up from the corners and covered the room and its inhabitants with its gloomy cloak.

But, as in the cave, one moment I was on the verge of absolute terror, with my own child's voice screaming in my ear, and the next I found myself landed on the other side of the abyss. Somehow the knot in my stomach had been magically undone and I was keen and lucid again.

Like my co-spectators I rested my hands on a circular railing and looked down on a broad concave table – perfectly smooth and white – whilst the woman in tweed pressedon with her practised intonation about the room in which we stood. With one hand she had hold of a long wooden rod
which hung down from the high ceiling and as our eyes accustomed themselves to the dark she gradually became more visible. Her hands and face had about them a ghostly luminosity. She twisted the rod, saying, ‘… the same principle as the camera. A tiny aperture in the roof allows an image to be cast on the dish below …'

And indeed, as her incantation washed over me I saw the first outlines of a picture take shape. I saw trees – the trees of the nearby gardens, their branches slowly coming into focus, whilst behind, the whole length of Princes Street was emerging from the mist. It was as if we were witnessing, from a bird's-eye view, the very making of Edinburgh. For a minute I was quite overcome with emotion and when I snatched a glance at my fellows found my own astonishment reflected there. Like characters in a Rembrandt their faces shone with the dish's milky light.

I looked back to the dish just in time to see the whole picture suddenly slip on its axis, accompanied by the creaking of the tweedy woman's rod as it was twisted in her grip. The castle swung into view.

‘Hurrah,' cried one of the other gentlemen.

‘The Fortress,' announced our guide.

Every detail was sharp as a pin now and I was thinking how remarkably like a photograph this image was – a very round and colourful one at that – when a seagull sailed right across the shallow bowl and the scene was suddenly brought to life. Well, the whole company burst into startled laughter. One or two started chattering excitedly.

‘What we see,' announced our guide, as if to calm us, ‘is not fixed but a living image of the world outside.'

So there we stood, in the belly of a breathing camera, as the whole city leaked into us through a single beam of light. Yet the vision it cast among us was not in any way frozen but as real and vivid as could be.

As we watched that white dish and clung to our railing we were transported through each of the city's three hundred and sixty degrees. Here were horse-drawn trolleys inching up the High Street, past street pedlars with their baskets laid out – all the trade and transport of a working city, with the deep sea standing by.