The Necropolis Railway

by Andrew Martin

'You've come in on the footplate?' He pointed to Thirty-One, and I nodded.

  'Just for a jaunt, or have they got you firing all ready?'

  'Just for the jaunt,' I said. He really seemed to know nothing at all of railways. 'Mr Smith,' I said, 'when you were good enough to take an interest in me before, I was given to ... I was ... I formed the impression that you were connected to the London and South Western Railway.'

  Rowland Smith was always able to bring out the best from me, in a roundabout way. It had taken a lot for me to say that, just as it had taken a lot for me to ask him to take me on in the first place.

  He smiled and nodded. 'As you might know, this and that company are closely interconnected, the South Western running the trains to Brookwood by contractual arrangement with the Mausoleum Company. Some five months ago I found myself in the position of being able to do some work, advisory in nature in the main, for the board here, and I put myself forward. On finding I had been succesful, I of course resigned my seat on the board of the South Western so as to avoid any collision of interests.'

  I thought: it is not normal for a man like this to speak to a man like me in this way.

  Smith suddenly laughed, and in a most amiable manner. 'You yourself would have stayed at the South Western?'

  I could not help but nod, crimson-faced I should imagine.

  'But then you speak as a lifelong subscriber to The Railway Magazine,' said Smith, seeming to bow at me as he did so.

  The worried-looking man appeared at the doorway. 'If you must talk to me about those poles, Rowland -'

  'Yes, Erskine. I'm just saying hello to this young fellow here: Mr Jim Stringer. He is a very hard worker, entitled to every possible encouragement. He works with the chaps that drive for us, and he's always after footplate runs, so we'll be seeing a fair bit of him.'

  This obviously did not excite the elderly gentleman all that much; in fact it made him look very sad. As he looked on, Smith asked, 'Will you meet me, in order to let me ask you some questions?'

  'Questions as to what, sir?'

  'Oh, concerning the life at Nine Elms.'

  'Where?' I said, and I must have fairly gasped out the word.

  'My flat. The address is on the letters.' He reached into his jacket and a pocket book flopped open in his hand. 'You must come to my place,' he said again, 'and you must come by cab.' He held out his long, fine right hand, and I saw a ten shilling note there.

  I shook my head and took a step back; a cab (with an honest driver) could be had for sixpence a mile. I was young but I was not stupid, and it seemed to me plain that he wanted me to sneak on my fellows and would pay me to do so.

  'I'll write to you,' he said, putting the note back into his pocket as though quite used to having his offers refused. 'Do carry on with your tour,' he said. 'It's quite an interesting setup we've got here.'

  Chapter Nine

  Tuesday 24 November continued

  I could not stop thinking about what Rowland Smith had in mind for me in his flat in the Northern Division of London, but if anything could have taken my mind off it, the little Necropolis Station was the thing. It certainly was a very interesting show.

  I walked around the buffer stops to the second platform, where there was another row of low, dull buildings. I had been given permission to look about, so I opened one of the doors and there was a coffin. Above it, an electric light swayed on a chain that had a black cable entwined in its links. The coffin lid was off and, stepping forward, I saw a white face -1 could not say whether a man's or a woman's - with a mass of blackness below. There were chairs like thrones on either side, and I marvelled to think that this place was a waiting room of sorts. I looked again at the mighty electric light, thinking: all this modernity for the dead. But I longed for the roaring of gas, and I stepped out of there in double-quick time.

  I walked around the block of buildings on that platform and saw what from my side looked like a low wall but was in fact the top of a twenty-foot drop. At the bottom was a dazzling white courtyard with, on the far side, a fancy pink-brick building with a big arch cut through it. As I looked down, a black coach-and-four shot through the arch into the courtyard. The driver got down, and when he removed his black top hat I expected more blackness, but there was no hair there at all. It was as if he was letting me know: just between you and I, my unknown friend above, I am completely bald. He put the hat back on, left the carriage in the middle of the courtyard, and everything went still again save for the hot horses, stomping now and again in the shafts.

  Two minutes later a door on the right-hand side of the court opened, and two men in black came through it. Three more men in black came out from the tunnel, and one of these was talking all the time, but I couldn't see which one. The men stood still for a second; but their shadows, which were like the hands of clocks, kept growing. Then the bald fellow led the horses into stables at one side, and a coffin was taken out of the back of the carriage by the other four, who put it onto their shoulders and carried it quickly through a doorway in the bottom of the wall of which I was on top. I seemed to be watching a funeral taken at a running pace, but with all proper dignity preserved.

  The door below me closed, and then I heard a muffled, buried groaning getting louder and louder. This groaning changed to more of an open-air scream for a second, before the four men and the coffin burst out of a door right behind me that was in some part of the platform buildings. They'd come out of a rising room - in America they call them elevators. The coffin men turned and aimed towards me. For a second it was as if they were bringing their casket to me, asking me if I'd like to try it for size, and I was glad when they continued down the path towards the buffer bars. I now spotted an iron ladder coming up from the floor of the courtyard to where I was standing, and I thought: I'll go down.

  This place spoke of mystery, and it needed to be got to the bottom of, and so did that ladder.

  The courtyard was white and empty, except for horse droppings. I thought: for neatness and cleanness you must have up-to-date transport, but then I remembered Nine Elms. I went across the courtyard, through the arch, and out into the street. I couldn't quite get my bearings. I knew by the noise and the pickle-and-beer smell and the train thumping across the viaduct to one side that I must be in the same territory as my lodge. The front of the Necropolis building was straight out of the Arabian Nights - all domes and swirls and bricks of pink, as though it was embarrassed, for the street it stood in was plain enough. I tried to get the place straight in my head. It was like a castle with a courtyard, and this pink part with the arch running through it was where the portcullis would be. Yes, a castle with a portcullis, a courtyard - and a small railway station running along the top of its back wall.

  'Excuse me,' said a pleasant sort of voice at that moment. 'Is today Tuesday?'

  I turned around and saw another man in black - no undertaker this time, but a parson.

  ‘I am looking for the Tuesday Address on Interment,' he said. 'Do you know where it is held?'

  'Upstairs in there, I suppose,' I said, pointing at some of the lighted top windows of the pink part.

  'It is Tuesday, isn't it?' said the parson.

  'Do you mean today?' I said, because I was learning to be cautious with all remarks.

  "The last time I came it wasn't on,' he said, 'or at least it wasn't on here, but perhaps it sometimes happens elsewhere.'

  This parson, who was a very vague gentleman indeed, now walked under the arch and through a doorway in its side. I followed, and saw that he had entered a kind of vestibule with electric lights burning. It was all good wood; there was a triangle pattern everywhere in the panels, which meant something - the sign of a secret society - and on the wall just to the left of the door was a glass case with funeral notices inside. There was a smell of carbolic and old flowers.

  I walked in, and up the wide wooden staircase. There was nothing on the first floor save closed double doors and a great fan of flowers trapped in a glass globe. If they c
ould have had black flowers, I am sure they would. The sprays were perfect but I didn't like the way they didn't move, and I began to think more favourably of old Crystal and his fluttering blooms on the 'up' and 'down'.

  There were two lots of double doors on the next two landings, and two more on the fourth floor, which was the top one. On one of this pair was a card fitted into a slot, reading:

  'Extramural Interment: An Address by Mr S. Stanley'. From within, I could hear what I felt certain was the voice of the sad busybody I had glimpsed earlier scolding the fat boy, but this time he sounded slower, and lower and grander. He was saying, 'As it is appointed unto all men once to die, the subject of interment is one of universal interest. It comes home to every human breast, not only with a solemn but an emphatic closeness. Whatever, or whosoever, the head of a family in this vast city may be - whether high or low, rich or poor, young or old or in the prime of his days, he must...'

  I knew what was going on: this was the company crying its wares. I put my eye to the chink in the door, and although I could not see the speaker, I could count the number in his audience. There were four, including the parson I had spoken to in the street.

  I turned to the second door and, opening it, came upon a room in which were one loud clock and a lot of large books. Screwing my boldness up to the highest pitch, I entered this little library, which seemed more out of bounds, than any other part of the premises so far. The volumes were marked with every year from 1852 to the present. I picked out 1888, and opened it.

  'On Tuesday 19th of March,' I read, 'at a meeting of the directors -' Just then I heard a voice.

  I looked up from the book, but what I had heard was only the voice of Stanley coming through from the next room. He was in high force now. 'Within these numerous and loathsome decomposing troughs, for centuries past in the heart of the capital of a great Christian nation, the most depraved system of sepulture has existed that has ever disgraced the annals of civilisation ...' (His speech being very old fashioned, I couldn't properly follow the meaning.) 'During which time the amount of poisonous gases evolved from putrefaction into the civic atmosphere, beyond that absorbed by the soil, exceeded . . .' Here there was a short pause, before Stanley continued with a dismal booming, 'some seventy-five million cubic feet.'

  I read the book as long as I dared, and could not make sense of it. It was all lawyer's talk. But it wasn't all books, this room. The clock was on the mantel, which was very grand, and there was one black pot to the left of it and another to the right. Over the mantel were pictures of swells, five in all, with dates underneath. The first picture was titled 'Colonel Tidey', and he was dated 1799-1862. Well, that was his life, but there was another line, stating that he had been 'Chairman of the London Necropolis Company from 1854 to 1861'. Colonel Tidey was a bearded gentleman, as were the next three. The fifth only had moustaches, and had been photographed, not painted. His name was Sir John Rickerby, and he had gone from life, and of being chairman, in the same year, 1903, the only one to have done the two in one. Well, I thought, it's 1903 now, so he could have died this very morning, although that would have needed quick work by the picture framers.

  I thought of the worrit I had seen eating a chop and talking of poles to Mr Smith, the fellow called Erskine; he was the present chairman - he'd felt the need to remind Smith of it - so he would take the next spot on this chimney breast. I stood and looked at the pictures, deciding at length that each of the five seemed more down-hearted than the last.

  'Nothing more or less than to remove the sepulture of the dead from the homeseats of the living!' the voice from the next room was booming, in a desperate sort of way. I stepped out of the room with the pictures and the books, returning to the top of the stairs. 'Be assured, madam’ Stanley was saying - and he was back to his fast, busybody voice now - 'that a hopeful spirit is somehow maintained. By liberal expenditure of printer's ink has it been made known ...'

  When, five minutes later, I walked back along the first platform at the Necropolis station, I was amazed to see, beyond Thirty-One, the Bug sailing away from the station, with White-Chester leaning out from one side, holding onto his topper and looking back towards the Necropolis station, and Rowland Smith doing the same from the other side. Smith wore no hat, and his curly hair was flying.

  On Thirty-One, Barney Rose and Mike were waiting with steam up. They were not talking and Rose, I fancied, looked pinker and more crumpled than usual, perhaps because he was sitting on the sandbox and staring silently into the fire. 'Saw you talking to your Mr Smith, there,' he said, looking up at me. 'Most amiable, he seemed to be.' He was smiling, but more from habit than happiness, I thought. 'He works here, now,' he continued, "but he's still great mates with White-Chester.'

  "The two of them have just gone off in the Bug,' I said.

  Rose nodded, then he looked up and grinned. 'Dapper gentleman, ain't he?' he said, as some of his former cheeriness seemed to return. 'Yes, I'll say that for him, quite the masher, is that young chap.'

  Rose was suddenly speaking to me as a man and I made an effort to answer in kind: 'Quite the ladies' man, too, I should guess’ I said.

  'Oh, well,' he said, looking back up at me, 'I don't know about that, but I'll tell you this: he's tough as a bulldog under all those fine coats of his, a very good fellow to have batting on your side.' He nodded at me as if to say 'congratulations on that, at any rate', before slowly standing up and walking back over to the regulator.

  As we pulled away, I leant out of the cab and watched the Bug disappearing into the complications of the down-main with a great sense of desolation in me; of being a very small person in a very great city, where everything hurtled at too great a rate, and people moved from station to station, life to death, all in the blinking of an eye, with nobody to notice or care, or say that the world had been lost to madness, because the madness had by degrees become the normal thing. And nor could you step aside from it. You kept up with the game or you got flattened, as surely as if you'd stood on the tracks before one of Mr Ivatt's mighty Atlantics.

  And so I would try to keep up with the game.

  Chapter Ten

  Saturday 28 November

  On the Saturday following - by which time I had recorded all the strange events in my Lett's diary, with notes as to possible meanings in the many spare pages at the back - I walked through the door of my lodge after a long and lonely day of cleaning at Nine Elms to find my landlady in the kitchen. She was about her Saturday clothes-washing, stirring the boiler with a black wooden stick, and very prettily too, with her head turned away from the rising steam, which had somehow unloosed her curls.

  'Mr Stringer,' she said, nodding slowly.

  I nodded back, and she gave me a glance which I took to mean there was something a little too forward in the way I had looked at her, so there was nothing for it but to leave the kitchen.

  A few minutes later, however, when I was lying on my bed listening to the rumbling of the trains and looking once again at the notes in my diary (which had quite replaced The Railway Magazine for me), there came a knock on my door. 'Come in,' I said, standing up, but she would not.

  She had put her hair to rights; the style was complicated but most effective. 'You forgot to put out your washing again,' she said.

  'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Would it be too late to do it now?'

  'I'm just about to drain the boiler.'

  'Oh.'

  She was looking all around the room, as if she had never set eyes on it before, but I was interested to see that she did not once look at the water on the floor. Should I say that it was a little hard to be paying six shillings a week, with a pound down, for a place with a puddle next to the bed? I was struggling for the right words here when she thrust a piece of paper at me, saying, 'Mr Stringer, would you be so kind as to post this somewhere about the premises of your railway company? It is an advertisement.'

  'Yes,' I said, 'I would be very pleased to. Do you mind if I read it?'

  She shook h
er head.

  'Unusually excellent furnished bed and sitting room with garden view offered to respectable person,' I read aloud. 'One minute from Waterloo Station. No servants kept, every comfort and convenience. Very moderate terms.'

  'Well?' she said.

  'What room is this concerning?' I said.

  "The one alongside this one, of course,' she said.

  "The one with the looking glass?' I said.

  'It has a very pretty looking glass,' she said. 'Ought I to mention that?'

  'You've put down "No servants kept",' I said, 'but -'

  'I am not a servant,' she said, most indignantly.

  'No,' I said, 'of course not. I only meant that your terms do include laundry.'

  ‘I will wash clothes,' she said, 'if they are put out.'

  ‘I think it's an excellent notice,' I said, handing back the paper, 'unusually excellent, in fact, and I know just the spot for it at Nine Elms.' I had in mind the noticeboard in the timekeeper's office. I put the notice into my waistcoat pocket, and my eyes drifted once again to the water on the floor. I noticed that my landlady's had done the same. 'I wonder what causes the water on the floor?' I said.

  'A broken roof,' she said.

  She was certainly very direct. She walked into the room and put the toe of her boot into the puddle in a very hypnotising way. She looked up at me and her face was caught mysteriously between smiling and not. 'It's the trains have loosened the tiles on the roof,' she said. 'What I call the dray-horse engines do it - those fearful draggers that bring the heavy waggons over the arches and set every house in the district shaking.'

  'You mean the slow-goods?' I said.

  She did not seem very sure of that.

  I somehow took her to mean that she fancied the expresses at any rate, and I asked if that was true.