Half the World in Winter

by Maggie Joel

  A blast from the engine’s whistle startled the little girl on her dad’s lap and a moment later the train plunged into a cutting. It emerged almost at once and they were soon running alongside a canal. The line began to climb slightly and he could just make out the remains of a bridge up ahead, its recently smashed brickwork replaced by temporary wooden fences—

  He felt the blood drain from his face. His entire body turned cold. Perspiration formed on his forehead and upper lip. This was the place: the cutting, the canal, a lock approaching on the left-hand side, a white-painted lock-keeper’s lodge with horse brasses over the door and a broken-down cart in the yard; a barge, tethered and derelict; the bridge—

  The train rattled onwards, over a set of points and past a signal, passing the lock and the lodge and the broken-down cart, then up and over the bridge and Thomas started up, half leaving his seat, clutching the handrail above his head.

  The toll-path and a paddock of tall grass beside the railway line were still littered with broken bricks from the bridge and twisted bits of metal from the carriages but that was all. They approached and sailed past.

  Thomas sank down again into his seat and rubbed his face hard with his hands. His face felt clammy. He had wanted there to be some sign. Something by which people would know a little girl had died just here.

  He lowered his hands and looked at the farmer, who was now awake and regarding him warily.

  ‘A little girl died,’ said Thomas. ‘Just here. We’ve passed it now. Back there. A little girl.’

  The farmer made no reply and the train continued on its journey.

  ‘It will be only a small dinner. There is no question now of a larger party,’ Mrs Jarmyn announced in the drawing room of 19 Cadogan Mews, and what she meant was, Now that Roger is dead and the Brightsides in mourning and no longer able to attend.

  ‘Yes Mama,’ said Dinah, seated in the chair opposite and numbed by the idea of the dinner. But her mother seemed resolved to press ahead.

  ‘I have invited the Eberhardts and Captain Palmer,’ she went on. ‘And the Duvalls, the Miss Courtaulds, of course, Dr and Mrs Gant, Professor Dallinger, and Mr Freebody and his wife and Mr Hart from your father’s railway.’ Here she tapped her dinner table plan irritably. ‘Bill clearly said he was not able to attend and now he is—that means we have unequal numbers!’

  ‘So I may be excused from attending?’ offered Dinah.

  ‘Certainly not! We already have more gentlemen than ladies. Your attendance now is critical.’

  ‘And I am to partner Mr Hart?’ asked Dinah, hardly bothering to mask her dismay. Mr Hart, one of the directors of the railway, was a long-term bachelor though still of an age when the possibility of a wife was not entirely out of the question—or so, at least, her mother’s dinner invitation appeared to suggest.

  ‘It is a dinner, not a marriage proposal,’ replied her mother. ‘Besides, one never knows whom one might meet and what might occur,’ she added mysteriously, as though remembering her own first meeting with her future husband, and Dinah despaired. But here Mrs Jarmyn’s smile faded and she turned to study the seating plan on the table before her. Indeed she stared at the seating plan for so long she must surely have come up with every conceivable combination of who was to sit where. Dinah shifted restlessly, wondering if she could make her excuses and leave.

  ‘Mama?’

  Her mother looked up and inconceivably, appallingly, there were tears in her eyes. ‘Dinah, do please lower the lamp,’ she said. ‘The light is affecting my eyes.’

  Dismayed, Dinah reached up and adjusted the lamp that was fixed to the wall above their heads. Roger had died and in the pit of her own grief she had given no thought at all to how others might feel.

  But perhaps she had been mistaken for already her mother was applying herself once more to the knotty problem of the seating plan, and she pursed her lips and frowned and tapped her pen against the tabletop as though she were the Prime Minister reorganising his Cabinet.

  ‘Roderick Duvall has no connections or family at all of course and he made his money in South African diamond mines so he will end up in the centre of the table. Yet Emily Duvall is the daughter of the Bishop of St Albans so that puts her on Lucas’s right-hand side … Though now that she is married to Roderick that perhaps takes precedence, so ought she to be directly to

  Lucas’s right, after all? Do you know, Dinah, I cannot remember the last time we had the Duvalls over—and now I recall: they are dreadfully difficult to seat. When we had dinner at your aunt and uncle’s last year your aunt seated Mrs Duvall beside the Member of Parliament for Croydon which seemed like a snub at the time until it came out that the member had been offered a Cabinet post. (I remember thinking at the time Meredith appeared quite smug.) The Miss Courtaulds will be offended wherever I seat them so one might as well not worry too much. I could seat Aunt Fresia beside Mr Freebody—that will annoy them both.’ Mrs Jarmyn seemed to enjoy this prospect, then she paused, frowning. ‘I have an idea Mrs Freebody is related, though distantly, to the Beauchamps of Northamptonshire and they have land. I shall have to ask Lucas. That will make a difference. I’m afraid it does not bode well for Mrs Duvall.’

  ‘What about the Eberhardts?’ said Dinah, feeling some response was called for. ‘They are very wealthy.’

  ‘Of course, dear. They are American. But that makes no odds here,’ and by ‘here’, her mother was referring to the etiquette book that lay open on the table before her and over which she was now poring. ‘Dr Gant and therefore Mrs Gant will take precedence. Captain Palmer, by dint of his commission in the Royal Horse Guards, and Professor Dallinger, by dint of his being Chair of Divinity at University College, will similarly take precedence. I am afraid to say the Eberhardts outrank only Mr Duvall and Bill and poor Mr Hart. And you, Dinah.’

  ‘Poor me,’ sighed Dinah. She ought to feel peeved at finding herself lumped in with the owner of a South African diamond mine and Mr Hart but she felt nothing. ‘Perhaps it would be better if I did not attend?’ she suggested.

  ‘Don’t be absurd,’ replied her mother, not looking up. ‘You are a young lady of the house now. It would be unseemly if you did not attend. Now, the menu: we’ll start with artichoke soup and a clear turtle soup, then … I wonder, herring roe or anchovy toast?’

  Dinah tried to apply her mind to this conundrum but found that she could not.

  ‘No, on the whole I think it better we go with the anchovy toast,’ her mother decided, answering her own question, though why it was best to go with the anchovy toast rather than the herring roe she did not say. ‘Fillet of turbot, broiled lobster, medallions of veal, roast leg of lamb, boiled venison, wild duck. We need one more fowl dish … I would suggest pigeon but Cook has a morbid aversion to it, the origin of which one can only speculate.’

  Dinah nodded, recalling the scene the last time Cook had been asked to prepare pigeon.

  ‘I do not believe Cook realised what it was until Jack told her,’ said Dinah, remembering. ‘Perhaps if we do not tell her what they are, she may not take umbrage?’

  ‘Excellent idea, Dinah. I shall tell her they are Prussian fowls, a delicacy served in Potsdam and enjoyed by the Kaiser. So, we have fillet of turbot, broiled lobster, medallions of veal, roast leg of lamb, boiled venison, wild duck and Prussian fowl pie. Now: watercress, stewed celery, new potatoes, peas and a Hannover salad. Then to follow, a Sandringham pudding, a greengage pudding, pineapple creams and raspberry water ices … Will it be enough?’

  Dinah did not know if it would be enough. She did know that she had a secret and growing dread of the forthcoming dinner party that was, surely, out of all proportion to the event itself.

  Arriving at London’s great Euston terminus, armed only with an address on a letter, an overdue bill from an undertaker and the clothes he was wearing, Thomas Brinklow set off at once, making his way eastwards, and almost immediately got lost.

  The congested thoroughfares clogged with hansom cabs and over-laden
omnibuses quickly gave way to steeply sided passages and alleyways where narrow buildings crowded over each other almost meeting above his head, and where carriages could only travel single-file. The people—so many people!—surged and jostled so close a man had to watch his every step or risk theft or worse. After an hour the passages at last opened up to allow some daylight to penetrate and he found himself at the steps of St Paul’s, where he sank down to rest, too demoralised and exhausted even to marvel at its greatness. He already hated London with a fervour that took his breath away and the great cathedral seemed to him a monument of all that was hateful: something so grand and immense yet surrounded by such poverty and degradation was monstrous and he would not deign to gaze up at its fabled dome.

  He stood up. But which direction? He was no longer even certain from which direction he had come, and he could no more seek directions from these folk swarming every which way than he could from a Frenchman, as he could not fathom a word they said.

  Had it not been for the protestors it is doubtful Thomas would have found the place at all. As it was, he stumbled in sheer exhaustion right past the turning, and the gradual realisation that the sound he could now hear was not the rabble of Cockney voices he had already come to loathe, but was in fact chanting, caused him to pause. He found himself standing at the entrance to a street as narrow and confined as those around it, curving sharply to the south halfway along its length and bordered on both sides by dingy clerks’ offices and shops with dusty windows and closed doors. Looking up he saw a street sign nailed high up on the corner of a building that announced itself as Half Mitre Street, and if the name of the street suggested some ecclesiastical connection, this was not reflected in the commercial premises housed along it, most of which appeared to be pen and ink and paper suppliers. In the middle of the street, at the point at which it veered to the south, was a prominent six-storey building, gabled and imposing, and it was from outside this building that the chanting came: a motley collection of perhaps eight to ten individuals—at least three of them young women—stood in a loose semicircle waving handmade placards and proclaiming their outrage in no uncertain terms.

  ‘People first! Profit last!’ appeared to be the gist of the chant. There was little doubt he had come to the right place, and as confirmation he now saw beside the doorway a discreet engraved sign announcing in ornate lettering that this was the offices of the North West Midlands Railway Company. Protestors he had not anticipated. There had been a crowd outside the inquest—more of an angry mob, really—and again on the first day of the inquiry, but that was folk directly affected by the accident, folk that lived and worked and travelled daily on the railway. These people here, they were another kind of folk altogether. One or two of the men wore cheaply made suits and dressed like they themselves worked in an office; the others—apart from the three young women, whose presence he could not fathom—were dressed in a way he was unfamiliar with: unkempt and bearded, their clothes ill-fitting and shabby, yet they did not look like the kind of working folk he knew.

  As he stood there the door of the office opened and a gentleman in a black coat and a tall hat emerged. The gentleman carried an umbrella and as he stepped through the doorway he peered suspiciously upwards at the gathering clouds. Then he peered suspiciously at Thomas and Thomas saw that it was the man who had attended Alice’s funeral and who had left in a carriage. The gentleman appeared not to recognise him and similarly dismissed the small crowd who now surged towards him, their chanting rising a notch, their placards waving furiously about his head. One of the young men, the most unkempt, wearing the shabbiest coat, now thrust himself directly in the gentleman’s way.

  ‘We have your name, Sinclair!’ he declared, jabbing a finger into the man’s chest. ‘The days when you can hide behind corrupt public officials and apathetic government ministers are ended!’

  At this the gentleman angrily thrust his accuser’s arm aside and strode off with a loud ‘Tshk!’ amidst a chorus of ‘Shame! Shame!’ from the gathered protestors.

  ‘You will be held accountable!’ the shabby man shouted.

  After this excitement everyone appeared a little ruffled, particularly the three women, who were flushed and out of breath. The man who had shouted strutted back and forth, then he stopped when he saw Thomas.

  ‘What’s your business here?’ he demanded as though his part in the protest gave him some position of authority.

  ‘No business of yours,’ Thomas replied brusquely pushing past the man and, though he had not entirely resolved his own course of action, he entered the office.

  He found himself in a sort of antechamber framed with dark panelled walls that muffled the sounds from the street outside so effectively Thomas was disconcerted. The room contained a number of upright leather chairs around a low, green baize-covered table and an imposing and highly polished counter behind which a clerk sat, with a number of closed doors ranged behind him. The clerk, a white-haired, extremely elderly gentleman in a tight black coat and waistcoat and very high stiff collar, was scratching figures into a voluminous ledger opened on the desk before him. He paused at Thomas’s entrance, his pen poised mid-stroke, and slowly regarded the unlikely intruder from his mud-splattered workman’s boots to the cap on his head as he might a new specimen at the zoological gardens.

  ‘Take one more step inside these premises and I shall be forced to summon a constable!’ he declared in a voice as truculent as it was feeble with age, clutching his pen in a gnarled hand as though it were a weapon with which he was prepared to defend both himself and his employers to the death.

  Thomas had been prepared to be civil but the man’s words enflamed him. ‘Summon a constable! I shall not care. I shall tell the man your railway killed my child!’

  The man did at least have the grace to look startled at these words.

  ‘Here!’ Thomas went on, producing the torn letter of condolence from his pocket and pointing to the relevant passage: ‘The railway is desirous to make every effort possible to contact the relatives of the deceased and injured so that everything might be done for them as lies within their power!’ And here—’ he brandished his second document—‘is the bill from for the funeral which they did not pay!’

  The clerk regarded the letter and then the unpaid bill down the length of his nose. He squinted at them, he even went so far as to pick up both documents and inspect them much as a detective of police might inspect a bloodied footprint at the scene of a crime. Then he replaced them and slid them back across the counter with the tip of his pen.

  ‘If you have a complaint it must be made in writing.’

  ‘You do not seem to understand—I have journeyed here from the North! Through this company’s actions I have lost my job! I have the bill for the funeral which they did not pay—’ and Thomas snatched up both documents and crushed them in his fist under the man’s nose.

  At this the old man leapt to his feet, producing from beneath his desk an ancient bone-handled silver duelling pistol which he brandished menacingly at the intruder. ‘Leave at once or I shall send for the constable! Be gone!’

  Considerably startled, Thomas stumbled backwards out of the office where he stood in a daze so that for a heartbeat, two heartbeats, he did not move or even think. When he did move it was to snatch a placard from the nearest protestor—a young woman soberly dressed in black with a lace bonnet on her head and a Bible clasped in her free hand—and with a cry he swung it, cricket-bat style at the window of the office. The young woman whose placard he had appropriated screamed and two men whom he had not observed before and who did not appear to be part of the protest now darted out and grabbed both his arms just at the critical moment that the placard hit the plate glass window, and the window survived, intact, though the placard was broken beyond repair. The elderly clerk had somehow scrambled down from his very high stool and now appeared in the office doorway shaking his fist in fury, and shouting for a constable. He was instantly surrounded by angry protestors who, though not
condoning of the newcomer’s violent methods nevertheless instinctively sympathised with his sentiment, and the elderly clerk was forced to beat a hasty retreat, locking the front door behind him.

  ‘Leave me! Leave me be!’ Thomas shouted, struggling against the two men, who had a firm hold of both his arms. They did not let go and, as he was dragged into the gutter and a fist landed in his gut and a boot thudded into his ribs and another into his lower back, he understood that these men were employed by the railway company to keep the peace. They kept the peace now, thoroughly and methodically, and by the time they had finished Thomas’s protest had ended and he lay curled up in a ball.

  When he came to himself it was to find that the thugs had long since melted away and the protestors were crowded around him, offering him a hand up and a handkerchief to douse his bleeding face and another to mop the blood from his shirt. But he wanted none of their assistance; they sickened him as much as the men who had beaten him did, as much as the clerk behind his desk. He fought them off furiously, struggling to his feet, retrieving his cap and pulling on his boot that had come off in the skirmish.

  As he did so a second gentleman now emerged from the offices of the railway company. This gentleman, younger than the first, in early middle-age, carrying his top hat and a furled black silk umbrella and wearing gloves, stepped through the doorway and paused only long enough to place his hat on his head and offer a cordial ‘Good day’ before making off at a smart pace westwards. The ancient clerk followed him to the door, still brandishing the archaic sidearm with which he clearly felt he could protect his departing master. It was enough to distract the small crowd who, enraged, now gave pursuit at a run, the young women hitching up their skirts and showing their ankles to the whole world just as though they cared nothing for what folk might think.