The Last Train to Scarborough

by Andrew Martin

  I shut the drawer and opened the next one down: comforters, socks, under-shirts, ties ... and more boxes. I opened the biggest box, made of wood. It held candles and matches. Another wooden one held a tangle of alberts. Next to this was a felt bag with a drawstring. I pulled at the string with two hands, and looked down on half a dozen straight razors with pearl handles. The biggest box was leather covered. I opened it and saw a vanity set, with scissors, nail-shaper, toothbrush all held in place on red velvet - and two twenty pound notes folded in half on top. I shut the drawer, and stood still, listening to the house. Did I hear a door slam downstairs?

  I marched up to the sea picture: 'Wreck of a Brig off Whitby', it was called. It showed a ship being rolled over in high seas; two men looked at the brig from the beach, and they were evidently a gormless pair. Why didn't they do something about it?

  But I felt the same. I had discovered nothing. Well, nothing except the money, and what did that signify? It was a good amount, but a fellow was entitled to keep forty pounds cash in his bedroom after all. I was still half drunk, and my head was pounding as I inspected the rest of the room. I threw open the first of the closets, releasing a smell of mothballs. Fielding hung his coats up all right - Adam Rickerby would have approved. The two had neatness in common, although they'd hardly exchanged a word since I'd been in the house. I moved over to the bookshelves. Novels, collected numbers of Notes and Queries, a digest of The Railway Magazine, Famous Sea Tales, Marine Painters of Britain, A Catalogue for the Collectors of Post Cards, The Literary Antiquary; some volumes on book collecting, some guides to Scarborough. I walked to the little bedside table, opened the drawer set into it, and here was not a box but an envelope. On the front was written: 'Railway Selection - Line-side Curiosities & C'. The flap of the envelope was tucked into place but not sealed. I lifted it up, and there were two post cards: the first showed a woman in a riding hat sitting side saddle on a white horse; the second showed her sitting astride the horse. She was quite naked in both.

  I froze, listened to the house; watched the door. There came faint voices from below, nothing besides.

  The overall picture was now composing, but the light of day was also fading, and Fielding's room was half enclosed in darkness as I replaced the cards - for there'd been half a dozen in the envelope, all of the same sort - and walked smartly out of his room and into the corridor. Here, I listened again before I approached the opened door of Miss Rickerby's bedroom.

  It was not exactly blue but lavender - her colour. The paraffin heater roared faintly as before. In combination with the low burning fire, this made the room too hot, also as before. I made first for the dressing table and opening the top-most drawer I did not care for the look of my face in the triple mirror (which seemed to give all the angles of the photographs in a criminal record card). The drawer held a great mix-up of buttons, buckles, beads, chains, lockets. I pricked my finger on the pin of a butterfly brooch. The stones on the brooch and on the chains and pendants were not precious as far as I could judge, and it made me feel sorry for the owner.

  There was some silver there however - just pitched in anyhow with everything else. I saw a decorated paper fan. I caught it up, and opened it out, bringing to life a sea-side scene: a long promenade with happy bicyclists, and strollers with parasols and sun hats. I could not make out the words at the top, so I held it towards the seething blue flame of the paraffin heater and read: 'Eastbourne, Sussex'. She liked Eastbourne. I knew that already.

  I tried the second drawer. It held some mysterious bundles of cotton and muslin that I knew I ought not to look at, two folded corsets; also a pair of small binoculars, another jumble of jewellery and some documents pinned together. I removed the pin. The first paper was a clipping from a magazine: 'Are You Troubled by Poor Eyesight?' An optician's advertisement - and I felt a surge of love for Miss Rickerby. The next paper was a handwritten letter, and I could hardly read a word of it; there were a couple more in the same shocking hand. I stared at the final page of the final one, and swung it in the direction of the blue light. At length, I made out 'a compass - only a trinket but it works'. The document that came after was type-written, perfectly clear . .. and all the breath stopped on my lips as I read the heading that had been underlined at the top: Re: Your Claim Against The North Eastern Railway Company. The letter began:

  Dear Mr Rickerby, please find enclosed a letter we received on the 5th inst. from Parker and Wilkinson of York, the solicitors acting for the North Eastern Railway Company in this matter.

  The letter offers compensation in the sum of one hundred and twenty pounds and payment of your costs in full and final settlement of your claim. We believe this offer to be reasonable in view of the danger of a finding of contributory negligence against you should the case be pursued and taken into court.

  As you will see from the letter, this offer stands for the next sixty days...

  I returned to the top of the letter. The address was that of Messrs Robinson, Farmery and Farmery of Middlesbrough, and carried the date 11 March, 1910.1 supposed they would have known that Adam Rickerby was unable to read, and that the business would be dealt with on his behalf by his sister. She, at any rate, had been the one who'd kept the letter, and it proved that Adam Rickerby had not been made strange by the collapse of a pit prop. He'd tangled with a train, and it was odds-on that the money paid over as a consequence - and paid through the agency of the firm that I would shortly be working for - had bought the Paradise guest house.

  I could make nothing of the other papers. I replaced the pin, and my eye fell on the one box in the drawer. It was about three inches square, the lid decorated with sea shells. I lifted the lid, and saw a small silver compass set into a miniature replica of a ship's wheel. But it was the object lying alongside it that I picked up. In the half light I saw the crest of the City of York, the Leeds crest, the sheep, the ears of corn. Here was the badge of the North Eastern Railway, and I was quite certain that it had once belonged to Ray Blackburn.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I stepped out of Amanda Rickerby's room and walked along the dark corridor to the top of the staircase, where I heard the sound of rainfall. The front door was open, but it closed as I looked down. Fielding appeared at the foot of the stairs. His gramophone club business evidently concluded, he was putting on his coat in the hall, under the gas chandelier. I had not seen his coat before. It had a velvet collar.

  'You look tired,' I called down, for he did, and I wanted to appear mannerly, not like a burglar. He looked up the stairs and nodded his head a few times.

  'I believe we all are,' he said.

  I called down, 'A lot of drinking goes on in this house,' and he tipped his head to see if I was joking, looking for a clue as to how to take this.

  He gave a half smile, and said, 'What else can you do on a day like today in Scarborough?' and he put on a wide- brimmed hat.

  'Where are you going?' I enquired, and he might easily have told me to mind my own business, but he said: 'Take the air. A saunter... Can one saunter in a storm?'

  'Where's Miss Rickerby?' I called down.

  This was forward of me again, but he said, 'She left a moment ago to do the same, I think. The boy went with her... There's some of the wine left chilling in the larder, Mr

  Stringer,' he added with great weariness as he opened the door and contemplated the wind and the rain. Then he stepped through it and was gone.

  I cannot say for certain why, but in the next moment I dashed down the stairs and entered the dining room, kitchen and scullery in turn. Only in the scullery, where the walls were of white-glazed brick, did a gas light burn. The rough wooden door beside the mangle must be the entry to Adam Rickerby's room. I knocked - no answer. I lifted the latch, pushed the door, and the light from the scullery fell on another scullery, or so it appeared, but this with a truckle bed in it. A good-sized barrel stood in the room, an old washing dolly, a quantity of carefully folded sacks, and a bicycle with the front wheel smaller than th
e back so as to make way for a great basket. There was no carpet on the stone floor, and no fireplace but many thick blankets on the bed, which was neatly made up with hardly a crease in the pillow. A trunk stood by the side of the bed. I lifted the lid, and saw rough clothes, neatly folded. Many objects hung from nails on the wall: a bike tyre, an oilcloth, a sou'wester, an apron, and a cork lifejacket. Well, Adam Rickerby lived by the sea, so it was not surprising that he owned a boat. Most who owned boats owned lifejackets. None of this was out of the common, except that I couldn't quite imagine him in charge of a boat, at large on the seas without his sister to encourage him and set him right when he went wrong.

  I stepped out of the room, closed the door behind me, and returned to the gloomy kitchen, where something drew me over towards the knife polisher. It looked like a round wooden wheel, the rim of which had been repeatedly stabbed by knives, although in fact they rested in slots. One of the holes accommodated several long, thin items: three skewers of some sort, and a nine inch needle with an eye, which was perhaps for trussing up meat prior to roasting. In the centre of the polisher was a handle connected to a circular brush: you wound it and the blades inside were cleaned.

  I climbed the steps, which were all in darkness; had a piss in the gloomy bathroom on the half decorated floor and wandered along towards the door of the apartment-in-the-making. I turned the handle, and stepped through to see amid the shadows the rags of half stripped paper hanging from the walls, the bare boards and the parade of paint tins. The window stood open as before, and I watched for a while the waves hitting the harbour wall a quarter of a mile off. I knew what I was doing: I was putting off looking through the hole in the wall. I watched the sea make three attempts to send spray to the top of the lighthouse, and then I approached the hole, which was about man-sized.

  The shreds of faded green-stripe wallpaper made a kind of curtain over it. I pushed them aside, stepped through, and my boots came down silently -1 was on carpet, which was a turnup. I could feel the carpet but not see it, for this second room was darker than the first. But this room too had a window over-looking the front, and objects began to appear by the phosphorous light of the sea beyond: a small sofa, an armchair, a clock on the wall, a high bed with mattress and covers still on and neatly made. There had been some attempt to clear the room: the dwarf bookcase held only one volume, and there were no ornaments to be seen, save for a clock that rested on a tasselled cloth spread over the mantel-shelf. A sheet of paper rested on the counterpane of the bed. I meant to read it, but as I took a step forwards, the flute note came from the fireplace, and I nearly bolted from the room as the paper jumped off the bed, and floated, swinging gently, to the ground. It was the wind coming through the chimney. I walked over, and was relieved to read only the words 'Trips by Steamer' and a list of timings. My hand was shaking as I held it though; I'd had a bad turn, and did not care to stay in the room. I stepped back through the hole, and in a moment I was climbing the topmost staircase under the eyes of old man Rickerby who gave me the evil eye from each of the three photographs in turn.

  In the half landing outside my own quarters I fumbled for some matches, pushed open the door, and lit the oil lamp in my little room. It glowed red and the redness made the little room seem the most welcoming of all, and it made me immediately sleepy into the bargain. But I would not sleep. I sat at the end of the bed and removed the piece of paste-board that kept the small window from rattling. I lifted the sash and leant forward, looking down at the Prom below, letting the sea wind move my hair about and breathing deep, cold breaths. I then filled my water glass from the jug by the wash stand and took a drink. I lay down on the bed, and pulled aside the tab rug that lay half underneath the bedstead. The little copper stubs marking the tops of the gas pipes remained tightly sealed. I put the rug back, and listened to the little window shaking. Every small gust caused a fearful din, and the bigger ones seemed set fair to break the glass. I leant forward and lowered the window. It rattled less when closed. I ought really to put back the pasteboard, but I could hardly be bothered. I lay still, listened to the waves, and revolved a hundred bad thoughts: Amanda Rickerby had lied about her brother's accident because it might be seen to have given him a grievance against railway men; Fielding was not queer - or he was a strange sort of queer if he went to bed with pictures of naked ladies. I called to mind the pictures. Lucky horse! But I hadn't the energy to make use of the memory - I was tired out, having hardly slept for three nights. I thought of the wife, and how she'd say, 'You're overstrung, Stringer', and brush my hair right back, for she thought it should go that way rather than the parting at the side, and I was sure that it therefore would do in time.

  ... But how I liked it when she brushed it back. You'd have thought she'd have better things to do, just because she generally had so much on, what with the Co-operative ladies and the women's cause and the new house and all the rest of it.

  I closed my eyes, and I don't believe that I slept, but when I opened them again I saw that there was an intruder in the room, in the shape of a twist of black smoke rising up from the red lamp. As I looked on the redness flared, causing everything in the room to lean away from the window, and then it died away to nothing. The oil had run out. I had the manual for the lamp but no more oil, and I must have light, so I dragged myself to my feet, found my matches in my pocket, and walked out onto the little landing. Reaching up to the gas bracket I turned the tap, breathed the hot coal breath, and lit it, whereupon I was instantly joined on the landing by my own shadow. I had not had sixpence about me, but Miss Rickerby, or her brother, must have fed the meter before going out.

  I moved back into the little room, kicked the door shut, and fell onto the bed, where I turned on my side and contemplated the line of white light under the door. The bad thoughts came back: Robert Henderson's hair was brushed directly back. In order to have a fraction of his money I must work all the hours God gave at a job I didn't want to do. Five years of articled clerkship, and for what? So that I might offer a kid a hundred and twenty pounds in exchange for half his brain. My thoughts flew to Tommy Nugent, and I hoped he was back in York, courting his girl from the Overcoat Depot on Parliament Street. I pictured the wife again, wearing my third best suit- coat as she showed her friend Lillian Backhouse about the new garden. That was all right: Lillian Backhouse was another feminist, and the suit-coat looked better on Lydia than on me, in spite of it being twice her size.

  Amanda Rickerby came to mind once more ... How had she come by the badge and why had she kept it? My head was fairly spinning. Had she asked me to lock my door in order to protect me from the boy? From Fielding? From Vaughan? (Surely not from Vaughan?) Or did she mean to come up and sit astride me as the woman on the post card had sat astride the horse? I did not believe she would do, but I decided that the moment we'd shared in the ship room ought to mark the end of our relations. I was a married man after all. I stood up, locked the door, fell back onto the bed, and even though it was hardly more than late afternoon, I was asleep in an instant, my boots still on my feet.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  'You were dead wrong about Adam Rickerby,' said the Captain, pushing back his chair and rising to his feet with the pocket revolver in his hand.

  If he didn't mean to shoot me, then he might be on the point of quitting the chart room, and I wanted him to stay, firstly because I knew he had secrets of his own touching this matter and secondly because I wanted to talk on. I wanted to get behind the mist, and I now knew I could do it. The recollection of my exchange with Miss Rickerby in the ship room came with many complications, and the best thing was to talk on because my speech brought back my memory of what came next and remembering, at least, was something I could be proud of.

  The Mate was eyeing the Captain, and so was I - had been for some little while. It was the difference that made the similarity so plain: the Captain's face never smiling, hers almost always; his hair short, curls not given time to begin, hers abundant. But there was a strength to
the Captain's close-cut hair, a sort of possibility in it. How could I not have noticed before that they had only the one face between them: wide, symmetrical, cat-like? The boy had the same face again, but the accident or some earlier event had made mockery of it, stretching it too wide and piling on the curls. He had been over-done. Anyhow, I knew that this was Captain Rickerby sitting before me, and that he had once sent a silver compass set in a miniature ship's wheel to his sister.

  'I'll tell you what happened,' I said to him, just as though he was Peter Backhouse, sitting over-opposite me in the public bar of the Fortune of War in Thorpe-on-Ouse with more than a few pints taken; and I did feel a kind of drunken happiness, for I could now see the whole thing clear.

  'It was the light under the door,' I said to the Captain, who'd now sat back down. 'It was not there - the line of white light - and I was half glad of it, because I knew it would have hurt my eyes if it had been. That was part of my affliction ... You see, I believe that what happened to me - what was done to me - impaired my memory, but I have now recovered my memory. I can go on from here and tell you the whole thing. I have the solution to the mystery.'

  I made my play:

  'The woman in the post cards,' I said,'... not the one on the horse, but the one that Vaughan had liked particularly... You see, she was Blackburn's fiancée, and when Blackburn was shown the cards in the Two Mariners he attacked Vaughan, really laid into him ...'